All important
philosophers, in the East European, and West European
traditions were preoccupied also, directly or
indirectly, by the concept of God, and even by the
possibility of His existence, or, at least, by the
possibility of speaking about His existence, in a
meaningful way. The philosophy of religion is concerned
with what can be called, in Kantian terms, the
“conditions of possibility” of the religious sphere.
From Nietzsche to Heidegger there has been a sustained
critique of the metaphysical presuppositions of Western
religious belief.[1]According to Derrida’s claim modern Western philosophy
has been obsessed by ‘foundationalism,’ which means the
assumed task of philosophy to uncover the ultimate
foundations of knowledge and reality. In Western and
Middle Eastern religious views, God was seen as (arche),
the foundation or ground of being, and an important
metaphysical deployment was needed in order to make
sense of someone who is, in the same time,
transcendental, and also involved intimately with the
human nature. What is difficult to accept through faith,
which is always shadowed by reason, is even more
difficult to demonstrate through reason, and more so,
when faith lacks.

The history of
metaphysics encountered numerous obstacles in
demonstrating rationally the possibility of the
existence of God, and even more when it tried to
demonstrate the actual existence of a personal God. In
this context the “death of God,” which Nietzsche
proclaimed, is in effect the death of a metaphysical
God.[2]
The task of the philosopher of religion is to understand
what meaning can be given to religious discourse in
times when the metaphysical God has been set out of the
context. Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida have been
the two main personalities concerned with this issue
upon which the possibility of a philosophy of God is
depending.[3]

In his work, Culture and
Value, Wittgenstein wrote: “An honest religious thinker
is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he
were walking on nothing but air. His support is the
slenderest imaginable. And yet it is possible to walk on
it.”[4]
To elaborate a philosophy of religion without the help
of traditional metaphysics is to realize a minimalist
form of such a philosophy. Starting with Kant, a whole
new direction into classical philosophy of religion was
introduced. Kant has shown that pure or speculative
reason was not able to rise beyond our sensory
experience. Kant asserted that only the “practical
reason” can fill the space left by the discredited
metaphysics. Kant’s rejection of any philosophy of
religion based on metaphysics has had an enormous
influence on modern thought. John Henry Newman and
Edouard Le Roy have developed Kant’s ideas, recognizing
morality as being the only possible entry into the
religious order while others embraced Kant’s dismissal
of metaphysics in the “Critique of Pure Reason” but, in
the same time, rejecting the escape offered by Kant in
the “Critique of Practical Reason.” Initially, I
intended to extend this dissertation to Derrida’s
philosophy also but working on it I realized that such a
project will surpass by far the scope and space of this
proposition.

In my opinion, the most
fundamental question of the philosophy of religion is to
know what are the relationships between humans, as
finite beings, and an infinite cosmic reality, and if
behind this cosmic reality, or in it, there is any
autonomous rationality. In the present dissertation I
want to show that metaphysics are intrinsically and
indestructibility linked to the above question of the
philosophy of religion and when one wants to ‘divorce’
with metaphysics, one is prevented from answering the
named question. This happened with Nietzsche and
Heidegger, who were prevented from answering the most
important question of the philosophy of God, and a
necessary one, when decided that the metaphysics are no
longer relevant for philosophy, so a way out of it must
be found. For this reason, I consider Hegel’s
metaphysical system a powerful attempt to answer to the
most important question of the philosophy of religion.
If one must get rid of metaphysics, one must first
answer to the question: “How is it possible to separate
philosophy from metaphysics, and in the same time to
touch meaningfully and rationally the question of God?”
Infinity is an object of preoccupation for humans and
will always be and up to this moment religious
revelation was the only relevant way to approach it and
metaphysics to speak about it.

Hegel is considered to
be a figure of “dialectical equivocity.”[5]
A philosopher, who places religion at the highest
standpoint of the absolute, has also been seen as a
major influence on modern atheism, and that, through
some of his inheritors, such as Feuerbach. Nevertheless,
Hegel was not involved in the trend of thought which
implicates philosophising about religion, but without
seriously speaking about God. From his point of view we
cannot avoid speaking about God. When we speak of God,
from Hegel’s perspective, it is important, firstly, to
establish what we understand by God. I will follow few
paths which will bring me to standpoints from which
certain assessments can be made. First of all, will be
the idea of transcendence.

“Transcendence” is not a
Hegelian word and Hegel was a philosopher who developed
the concept of immanence. Hegel was suspicious about a
God who is ‘beyond.’ He didn’t see any value in such a
God, rather a source of problems. Hegel’s God is the
result of a speculative philosophy of immanence.
Generally speaking, when talking about transcendence,
one should differentiate the human self transcendence
from the transcendence in which God is seen as a
transcendental ‘other.’ The Christian God transcends
finite creation or nature; He transcends humanity or
history, not as human self transcendence but as a
transcendent ‘other.’

Secondly, when we look
to the issue of God in philosophy, the relations between
‘whole,’ and ‘parts,’ and between finitude and infinity
are the main object. Where is Hegel standing, from these
points of view? Hegel seems to suggest that, in his
understanding, God is the Whole of wholes, and any other
God, beyond that ‘totality,’ doesn’t find His place in
his philosophical context.[6]
Hegel is constructing his God, starting from religious
sources but drawing apart from them in the effort of
reconfiguration of the divine transcendence.

One is prompted to the
core of the issue of transcendence by an astonishing
problem, which is an ontological one. “Why are beings
and not nothing?” The possibility of a transcendence as
‘other’ is raised by such a question. What is the
ontological origin of beings? What gives ‘existence’ to
the things which are said “to be?” These are perplexing
questions and the object of major preoccupation, in the
history of philosophy. Nevertheless, this ‘givenness’ of
being does not have an important place in Hegel’s
philosophy. In the same time, this givenness of being
directs the attention towards an intuition which goes
beyond a ‘totality’ of finite beings. Hegel doesn’t
answer this concern and the ‘Whole’ as ‘Totality’ is
problematic in many ways.

In connection with the
idea of transcendence, another kind can be also
discussed, namely a transcendence of self-being, which
is meet, for example, in the self-exceeding power of the
human beings, which are finite and yet surpass finitude
by their freedom and creativity. But the question is to
establish if our self transcendence means that we, as
human beings, are the product of our own creation or
there is another Creator, other than us, who is
responsible for this creation. The question of a
transcendent God is determined by the possibility of
existence of a reality, trans-human, and trans-natural,
a reality not identical with humans and not identical
with the whole of finite beings in nature.[7]

Besides an exterior, and
an interior transcendence can we speak of a superior
transcendence, or a more original source of
transcendence? This kind of ‘origin’ would have to be
other than finite possibility and realization. It would
have to be beyond determinate possibility and also
beyond all determinate realization. To describe such a
power or possibility is really problematic and the
difficulty is caused by the limitations of the language,
which is adapted for determinate finite beings.
Nevertheless, the immanent self surpassing power or self
determination of the human beings is not at all on the
same level of conception as the possibilizing power
beyond determinate possibility, and reality.

Hegel was concerned with
the ultimate ground and with the possibilizing source of
being and thought, and for him, this source is the Idea,
Geist, the absolute, or God. He formulated the issue of
transcendence in terms of a self-transcendence, which is
transcendence from self to other, and the come back to
self. There is not ultimate transcendence as ‘other,’
and in fact this type of transcendence is just a self
completing immanence. For Hegel there is an absolute
subjectivity that includes immanently the relation of
subject and object. Divine intersubjectivity is, in the
end, a relation between God and itself. Transcendence is
firstly the ‘trance,’ which means a going beyond or
across towards what is ‘not’ now oneself. If God is a
transcending being, there is an otherness, which is not
reducible to our self-determining. This transcendence
cannot coexist with an absolute human autonomy, meaning
absolutely in and for itself. There is an antinomy; if
human autonomy is absolute, transcendence, namely the
possibility of the existence of a transcendent God, has
to be relative; if the transcending possibility is seen
as absolute, autonomy must be relative.[8]

In William Desmond’s
opinion Hegel seeks a dialectical-speculative solution
to the antinomy of autonomy and transcendence. In Hegel,
there is no absolute transcendence as other. God
abrogates His own transcendence by entering time, and in
this process He is given over to immanence. The process
of self becoming is, in the same time, characteristic
for God, and for human beings. In Hegel’s philosophy,
all references to transcendence as other are included,
within the own process of self-determination of
autonomy. The absolute form of being is dialectically
self determining or, in other words, the absolute is
self-determining being. Is God, for Hegel, the human
being transcending itself towards the fulfilment of its
spirit, in a conceivable absolute? As R.C. Solomon put
it “If we cannot understand <<Geist,>> than we cannot
understand Hegel’s philosophy; the <<philosophy of
spirit>> is only as comprehensible as the concept of
<<Spirit.>>[9]
The same author maintains also that “What clearly
emerges from Hegel’s writings is that <<Geist>> refers
to some sort of general consciousness, a single mind
common to all men…Absolute consciousness is the explicit
recognition of one’s identity as universal Spirit. The
concept of <<Geist>> is the hallmark of a theory of self
identity – a theory in which I am something other than a
person.”[10]

In order to understand
better what “Geist” means, for Hegel, it should be said
that this is a German word which has all the meanings of
the English words: spirit, mind, soul and the French
word esprit. In the German language there is no
distinction between spirit and mind. Both meanings are
represented by the word “Geist.” Even if usually “Geist”
is translated either as spirit or mind they advisably
can be used with both meanings Spirit/Mind. The goal of
Spirit is Freedom, a Freedom which needs to be expressed
and reflected in order to be really free. For Hegel
there are three divisions of the philosophy of
Spirit/Mind. The Subjective Spirit/Mind, The Objective
Spirit/Mind, and The Absolute Spirit/Mind, the latter
exploring Fine Arts, Religion, and Philosophy.[11]

It must be noted that
the idea of universal mind doesn’t originate in Hegel,
but much earlier. The notion of universal mind came into
the Western Canon through the Pre-Socratic philosopher
Anaxagoras, coming to Athens at around 480 BC. He
taught that all things were created by Nous (Mind) and
that Mind held the cosmos together and gave human beings
a connection to the cosmos, or a pathway to the divine.[12]
A quotation from Marc Aurelius may be interesting, in
this context:

All things are
implicated with one another, and the bond is holy; and
there is hardly anything unconnected with any other
things. For things have been coordinated, and they
combine to make up the same universe. For there is one
universe made up of all things, and one god who pervades
all things, and one substance, and one law, and one
reason. Marcus Aurelius - The Meditations (7.9)[13]

Probably an important
task will be that of seeing how far Hegel’s conception
of philosophy of religion influenced the development of
the concept of universal mind, and universal
consciousness, which are important our days for the
understanding of spirituality. I would like to argue
that Hegel’s ideas are important today in clarifying
philosophically the concept of extended consciousness. I
hope that such an assignment can be fulfilled
progressively along with the presentation of Hegel’s
concept of God. On this ground, it must be said that,
for Hegel, the autonomous process of self determining is
the self-realization of reason itself, which comes to be
itself fully, by overcoming its incompleteness, and
indefiniteness, characteristic for its beginning, and by
this, becomes self-fulfilled. Is God, for Hegel,
“thinking thought” itself? Hegel rejects an
“objectivized beyond,” and develops an immanent
self-surpassing process of self-determination. In
Hegel’s philosophy we have a God that has to become
itself by a process of self-determination of what is
merely implicit in the beginning. By surpassing an
initial indefiniteness, ‘the absolute’ or God, ‘others’
itself, determines itself as ‘other’ that is other to
itself, but comes to itself more fully, by an explicit
relation with itself, in that otherness.

The great monotheistic
traditions saw God as beyond humanity and beyond nature,
and presented Him as a transcendent source of
revelation. In other words, God is beyond what reason
can conceive of Him, and that seems to be a reasonable
thought, as far as we cannot conceive the infinity that
is the infinite dimension of reality. In a way or
another, we realize that existence cannot ‘not’ be, as
Parmenides said, because we cannot accept the non-being
as the source of being. Letting aside the subjective
perception of being, from the perspective of personal
human experience, we often wonder at the universal
reality, which doesn’t have any conceivable beginning.
Even if there is a beginning of the existence, humanity
cannot conceive it, and for that reason, humans use to
name this extraordinary mystery, God. From the
explanation of natural phenomena such as reign, or the
solar system, God was pushed by the “modern sciences”
where the explanation of the ‘existence’ itself resides.
How is it possible to conceive an unending, infinite
existence, with no origin? Most probably, God stands
firm on the intellectual and spiritual ‘location’ from
which this question arises and either philosophy or
modern sciences are very far from any successful
attempt, to answer this question. On the other side, to
me, to conceive God as Someone ‘existing’ outside
‘existence’ and giving existence to the existing beings
is also very problematic. Nevertheless, this was a
spread Christian position. We can also ask: “What do we
have to understand by ‘existence’ and ‘being’ in pure
philosophical terms,” as Heidegger does, but this
demarche still doesn’t answer to the previous question.
Revelation and mystery are two sides of the same process
of knowledge, and Hegel is a philosopher of meanings,
who saw much further than his predecessors the meanings
of reality.

These questions are
challenging. Was there any beginning for ‘existence’?
Was the objective reality always there, without any
beginning, just there, in a multitude of possible forms?
Parmenides rightly said that the reality cannot “not
be,” meaning that it is impossible to imagine a complete
nothingness, starting from the standpoint of existence.
God beyond finitude is a challenge for humanity and the
question is how Hegel answered to this challenge. In the
Judeo Christian traditions God cannot really be grasped,
unless he decides to discover Himself to us. Our mind is
not able to conceive a reality, which goes beyond our
finitude, because all our instruments of thinking are
adapted only for a finite, determinate reality. The idea
of the revealed God was received with widespread
opposition in modernity, and Hegel is not an exception.
The word ‘God’ is often used by Hegel but this word
doesn’t entail the irreducible transcendence of the
Judeo Christian traditions.[14]

Before going any
further, it must be said that Kant was really important
for Hegel’s thinking. As Hegel said:

From the Kantian system
and its highest completion I expect a revolution in
Germany. It will proceed from principles that are
present and that only need to be elaborated and applied
to all hitherto existing knowledge. This is a fragment
of a Hegel’s letter to Shelling from 1795.[15]

For Kant, morality gives
ultimate significance to the human as ‘human.’ The human
being alone is characterised by inherent purpose, and by
this the humans are the inherent purpose of nature.
Kantian autonomy refers to humans own self-legislation;
transcendence, meaning the transcendence of Christian
God refers to another, beyond our determination. Kant
makes problematic the relevance of reason, when it is
used purely theoretical, and in a speculative manner, in
respect to the problem of God. He subjected all the so
called “philosophical proofs” of the existence of God to
a rational critique, and all of these proofs were
rejected. On the basis of concept alone one cannot
establish the existence of God. The gap between concept
and existence cannot be bridged by the concept alone.
The same is available for the concept of God. For Hegel,
one cannot establish a gulf between possibility and
actuality, in the concept, because the latter is
self-actualising in the sense that it gives itself
existence by thinking itself.

For Kant, practical
reason can do what theoretical reason cannot, that is,
can demonstrate God’s existence as a necessary axiom.
There is a tension between happiness and virtue. One can
be virtuous and unhappy but another can be happy and not
good. To alleviate this tension Kant appeals to the
divine. In order to realize a complete accord between
virtue and happiness Kant proposes that God will
establish this concordance by rewarding the virtuous,
with happiness, in the next life. For Kant, there is a
moral meaning of the whole and with that he makes
reference to a moral God, who keeps His otherness in
relation to the human beings.[16]
In the same time, the sense of the whole is important
both for Kant, and Hegel.

In Hegel, a holism of
nature will be reformulated, and the influence of
Spinoza is also present. For Hegel, thinking is the true
being of the divine. The whole is important for Hegel
because in his system God is the God of the whole. We
can ask if God is, for Hegel, the whole itself or God is
beyond the whole. The question is complicated because,
first of all, what and how could be anything beyond the
whole?[17]
Secondly, what the whole means? Has the concept of
‘whole’ any meaning when projected in infinity? There is
there a limit, and finite ways of thinking encounter
difficulties when reach that frontier. Hegel approaches
this barrier by a dialectic, which surpasses the limit.
The whole determines itself in its own
self-actualization, which is the only way to overcome
the limit, because, on the one side, the whole is its
own limit, but on the other side, the whole surpasses
this limit in its self-actualization. Infinity and
continuous, infinite, self-actualization are not
incompatible, as I, personally, see. Hegel’s whole is
infinite not finite, and it contains also finitude
within itself. What is the relation between finitude and
infinity? Can the relation between an infinite
transcendent other and the holistic immanence to be seen
as the relation between a transcendent God and his
creation? To answer to that question one has to see if
there is any place, in Hegel’s philosophy, for a
transcendent other, who is other than the immanent
whole. The answer was alluded to and will probably come,
in more detail, on the course of this essay, and I will
comeback also, to the problem of infinity.

For Hegel, reason is the
most important element, in his approach to God. More
over, reason cannot make sense of any reality if it
doesn’t make sense of God. Hegel sees thinking as a
continuous process of self-purification, thought
purifying itself of all sensible content whatever. This
is not of course a restriction of thinking, in relation
with the sensible things; it is rather a transformation
of those, in the process of thinking, in non-sensible
entities. Rational thought can think the sensible, and
the non-sensible, but only the rational thought can
think the non-sensible. The essence of the sensible is
finite, and for this reason, infinite, opposite to the
finite, has to be non-sensible, in Hegel’s view. And
that seems to be correct, at least from the perspective
of the direct sensorial perception of the infinite, as a
unique object of perception, because it is obvious that
infinity cannot be sensed, by our senses or imagined, by
our imagination. On the other side, an infinite reality,
formed by matter and energy, contains elements which can
each of them, separately or together, to a certain
extent, become the object of the sensory
perception.

‘Understanding’ tries to
‘represent’ the infinite, for example in mathematical
symbols and that is what it does when it tends to think
the object of religious consciousness. Nevertheless,
‘understanding’ cannot be successful with this because
it cannot detach itself from ‘representations.’ Only
reason goes beyond ‘understanding,’ consequently goes
beyond ‘representations,’ and with this, the reality of
God, which is the reality of the infinite, belongs only
to reason.[18]

When presented with
objects, for example linguistic messages, or religious
teachings, human mind gets an “immediate awareness.”
This content, immediately given, is processed by the
human mind by ‘thinking,’ and this is done through the
means of the ‘images.’ These images are
‘representations’ which the mind, in a subjective way,
makes to itself in order to help itself to come to grips
with the content presented.[19]
This is the beginning of a dynamic movement, away from
the image-character of what is presented. This is a
process, a progressive movement from image toward
thought. The movement of this process of thinking is
oriented to transcending itself in ‘thought,’ and in
this, shifts from subjective to objective. It is
important to say that an infinite, which could, in any
way be imagined, would not be infinite. Some questions
can arise, for example, it can be asked if it is
conceivable any kind of thinking without images. Before
answering that, one should be able to raises himself or
she to the speculative heights, of thinking, to which
Hegel is inviting us. Hegel doesn’t give any proofs, in
the formal-logical sense of the term, his logic is a
study of the ‘logos,’ in which reality reveals in
thought. Hegel doesn’t make the demonstration that the
infinite can be grasped in imageless thought, or even
that imageless thought exists. The only thing to do, for
the reader, is to follow Hegel’s thinking, and to be
persuaded by its good sense, by its logic. In other
words, the ‘proof’ of Hegel thinking lays in its
rationality, and that should be the correct reflection
of an object of thinking, having the highest
rationality, namely God.

Hegel has ‘theologized’
philosophy to a great extend so much so that even the
philosophical thinking, per se, cannot dispense with
faith, meaning with a content, which is faith. When
reason doesn’t see the rationality of faith, the fault
belongs to that particular kind of reason not to the
faith, because the content of faith is necessarily
rational. Religious ‘experience’ is neither irrational
nor ‘supra-rational’ it is within the scope of
rationality. Religious experience is integral to and
continuous with the trajectory of experience in the
process of becoming “absolute knowing.”[20]
Religious experience is a specific mode of thinking of
the absolute content which is God. Truth for Hegel is
the unity of the infinite and the finite. Spiritual
activity is the very process of humanizing human,
achieving this by authentically orienting the human to
the divine. To be human is to be spirit, since God is
the essence of the human. Reason “is the substance of
spirit.” In parallel with the rationality of thought is
the rationality of the object of thought. Object is
rational, either when it is present in the explicitly
rational form of philosophical thinking or in the
implicitly rational form of religious consciousness.[21]
From the nature, in which it is immersed, the human
spirit progressively moves to explicit rationality. A
union between human and the divine is essential to the
actualisation of the spirituality in the human. A
quotation from Hegel can be useful, at this moment:

Man becomes actual as a
spiritual being only when he overcomes his naturality.
This overcoming becomes possible only under the
supposition that the human and the divine natures are
substantially and consciously one, and that man, to the
extent that he is spirit, possesses the essentiality and
substantiality which pertains to the concept of God.[22]

As we can see, in the
above quotation, Hegel speaks about the concept of God,
and not about a Personal God, who is independently, and
fully other than man. Have we to understand that
thinking about God, developing the concept of God, make
us to become one with God? Is the consciousness of our
call toward divinity the way to become divine? Is it
enough to think to God, in order to become like Him, in
His nature, namely spiritual? The human call to
progressively spiritualize his or her naturality,
through thinking, is also a necessary path toward
absolute, toward the essence of divinity, which is
eternity or infinite. In thinking, man becomes divine
because thinking brings, in a necessary way, the human
spirit to the absolute, and in this, to the divine. The
call of the absolute in the human mind is the call of
divine, and this divine becomes conscious of himself in
the human consciousness when thinking man necessarily
evolve in his thinking toward a greater
spiritualization. This kind of progressive
spiritualization, through a process of self-cultivation
is not specific only for the individual but manly for
the culture of a people, and individuals share in a
culture which is common to all.[23]

The consciousness of the
union between human and divine is something in which man
must grow. This consciousness is given in Christ, and
man has to awaken it in him.[24]
The importance of Christian religious consciousness, in
the development of the post Roman culture was emphasised
by Hegel. The realization of man as spirit has a
history, with many elements in it, such as moral,
religious, legal or political. The whole process
envisaged the realization of man’s true being as spirit,
spirit which is the base for human freedom.
Nevertheless, in the development of the European
history, Hegel describes a movement of separation of
thought and culture, a split with their foundation in
the Absolute, the Divine. With Descartes the ruling of
the spirit from above is gradually replaced with the
self determination of the human spirit. For the
scientific mind the grace of God in not any more the
decisive factor for the self understanding of man.
“Cogito, ergo sum” is considered to be an
acknowledgement of the fact that being and human thought
are one. Observing the nature, the man noticed that the
external reality is similar to the internal one and the
nature has its own rationality visible in its laws.

Some see in the concept
of God expressed by Hegel only a metaphor, God being for
Hegel no more than the human spirit, even if not in the
individual, sense. Others consider that Hegel disengaged
himself with the human spirit when he presents the
spirit as a sort of ‘superhuman’ spirit, and the latter
is an ‘intrusive’ element, in the “biography of human
spirit.” I would argue that Hegel presents a sort of
panentheism in which the spirit is a consequence of the
evolution of different forms in which the spirit finds
itself in an incipient stage. In the same time, the
spirit pre-exists the human mind, because he is find
also in natural stages. This spirit is better seen as a
universal spirit, which becomes conscious of itself in
the human consciousness. In other words, the spirit
permeates the whole universe but know itself only
through the consciousness of the human, where the
infinite force of existence and the rationality of the
human mind meet. Nevertheless, to me, one can safely
extend the spirit not only to the collective
consciousness of humanity, but also to any possible
consciousness existing in the universe, for example,
other intelligent beings, unknown by us, but forming,
together with us, a unique consciousness, an infinite
being, communicating within all possible spirits.

In the same time, even
if the object of religion is divine, infinite Spirit,
the religious experience itself, of which Hegel makes
reference, is a human experience. Nevertheless, for
Hegel, the religious consciousness, which has God as its
object, is indispensable to authentic philosophical
thinking, and knowing. ‘Religion’ is the truth of
consciousness, as moral spirit, and religion points to
the fulfilment of its own truth in Absolute knowledge.
It must be said that speculative thinking, in its search
for truth, can never be confined to finding that truth
in what is immediately present in thought, but only in
that to which the immediately present points as its
‘truth.’ In the “Absolute knowing” the philosophical
form of ‘knowing’ is suited to the religious content of
‘believing,’ and ‘thought’ supersedes ‘representation’
without altering its ‘object.’ What Hegel has done was
to develop his thinking on the lines of Plato,
Aristotle, and Spinoza, who had in common the idea that
rational thinking is somehow divine and oriented to the
divine. Thought reveals as an infinite activity, and
only the infinite can have infinite activity. In order
to see this openness of thought towards the infinite
Being, which means that in a way humans are divine
through their thinking but the spirit is much more then
individual human spirit, and also to see the intricacies
through which ‘spirit’ realizes its own infinity one
should use “Science of Logic” as a guide in interpreting
the “Phenomenology of the Spirit.”[25]

The main point is the
attempt to understand if the ‘God’ of religion and the
‘God’ of philosophy are one and the same. As Hegel
wrights in the “Vorlesungen uber the Philosophie of
Religion”:

God is
self-consciousness; he knows himself in a consciousness
which is distinct from him, which is implicitly the
consciousness of God, but is also this explicitly since
it knows its identity with God, an identity which is
however, mediated by the negation of finitude. It is
this concept which constitutes the content of religion.
This is what God is: to distinguish himself from
himself, to be object to himself, and yet in this
distinction to be simply identical with himself – to be
Spirit. [VPR II, p. 187][26]

The God known in
religion is the same with the God known in philosophy,
in the sense of the object of knowledge. Philosophy and
religion have one and the same objective, that is,
truth, absolute truth, God.[27]

Another quotation from
“Enzyklopadie der philosophischen Wissenschaften” is
useful.

First of all, it is
true, philosophy has in common with religion that their
objects (Gegenstande) are the same. Both have the truth
as their object, and that in the highest sense – i.e.,
that God and God alone is the truth. In addition both
treat the sphere of the finite, nature and human spirit,
their relation to each other, and the relation of both
to God as their truth. [Epw, no. 1][28]

In Hegel’s view what is
important for the human spirit is to be in the service
of truth, because serving truth means serving God. The
truth however can be found in philosophy. For Hegel, the
content of philosophy is the “comprehensive knowledge of
God and [thus[ of physical and spiritual nature.”
Nevertheless, the sciences of nature, differ from
philosophy because in ‘science’ we can have a ‘content’
which is ‘empirical’ and a ‘form’ which is
‘philosophical,’ but in philosophy both ‘content’ and
‘form’ belong to thought and to thought alone. Does
Hegel have two meanings for the term God? This is very
difficult to prove. Rather, when Hegel says that
‘religion’ is “consciousness … of the absolute truth,”
he is saying that the ‘truth,’ which is “God and God
alone,” is one and the same in philosophy and religion.[29]

In the Introduction of
“Vorlesungen uber die Geschite der Philosophie,” Hegel
maintains that philosophy is the highest form in which
spirit reveals itself at any time or place. Philosophy
is not the only form because there are also
non-philosophical ways in which the „absolute idea,“
meaning spirit can be present in thought in art and
religion. They are „the way in which the supreme idea is
present for non-philosophical consciousness, for
sensitive, intuitive, representational consciousness.
(Einletung in die Geschite der Philosophy, p. 42)[30]
These ways are not ‚pure’ thought but are neither
non-rational because they are oriented to the supremely
spiritual form. The truth, as presented in art and
religion, is not based on rational argumentation
(Rasonnieren). Rational activity is not synonymous with
„logical argument” or with subjective thinking.
Consciousness is not rational because a purely rational
process of thinking arrives at truth, the rationality is
given by the internal rationality of the object of
thinking, correlative to that truth. The process of
thinking will be authentically rational only if it
accords with the inherent rationality of its object.[31]

Hegel was having a lot a
faith in the human, both for responding religiously to
the self-revelation of absolute Spirit and also for the
ability to understand rationally this revelation. The
rationality of the revelation has its source in the
Spirit who reveals, and the capacity to comprehend the
revelation leans on the spiritual character of the
recipient. Spirit speaks to spirit and the result of
this process is both religion and philosophy. What then
understands Hegel by spirit? One can start answering
this question by acknowledging that in the world that we
live we are confronted with two realities – nature and
spirit, that is the world of ‘things,’ and the world of
“spiritual activity.”[32]
What is the relationship between spirit, and matter?
Generally, there are several solutions. One of the
solutions is that of materializing spirit, in a
mechanical ‘reductionism’ or in a ‘dialectical’
emergence of ‘spiritual’ activity from its ‘material’
base. In other words, the cause of the existence of
spirit or its precondition is matter. Another solution
is that of spiritualizing matter, and this takes two
main forms. One is the power of spirit that, by its own
resources, transforms matter, and spiritualizes it, as
an object for thought. The second one is that spirit
recognizes that matter is not just matter but it bears
the imprints of spirit in it, and by this it becomes
possible, a sort of an appropriation of the matter by
the spirit. Fundamental to the second solution is the
conviction that both, logically and ontologically,
spirit takes precedence over matter, and also, that is
inherent in matter a certain capacity to be appropriated
by spirit. This capacity of the matter constitutes its
intelligibility. In the same time, it is not about a
totally independent intelligibility, but a
‘communicated’ intelligibility, and its reality is a
‘communicated’ reality. In Hegel, to communicate is the
privilege of spirit alone, and in order for the
‘communication’ to be meaningful, it must be
self-communication. It is possible to imagine this type
of ‘communication,’ but only if there is a mechanism of
communication, a relationship, having as its object this
communication. If the things are matter, how can they
make manifest to the human spirit? If they are not
spirit, but matter, logically they cannot communicate
themselves to us, but only through the existence of a
transcendental spirit, which makes possible, the
communication between a thing and the human spirit.[33]
It looks like nothing is illogical in seeing the being
of both ‘things’ and ‘spirits’ as a communicated being
which gives both things and spirits something in common
which relates them to each other, and relates both to
the Spirit.

For example, nature,
like art, speaks to us, not only as an object of science
but rather as a message from an Artist, who wants to
communicate something more profound to us. In any event,
it is difficult to see how such kind of consciousnesses
is ‘illogical.’ If we go along with Hegel’s
philosophical system, we can say that the One who
speaks, through nature, is God.[34]
For Hegel, it is not only the nature, through which God
speaks, but the human spirit speaks far more strongly of
“absolute Spirit” than did nature. The most powerful
indicators of both the reality and ‘nature’ of God are
the reality and ‘nature’ of the human spirit. Human
spirit reveals divine Spirit in a way that neither
nature nor art can.[35]
When the individual consciousness experiences its own
spirit, in the same time that particular individual
consciousness experiences the “absolute Spirit” also.
Individual consciousness of itself has a meaning only
when it is a consciousness of itself as spirit, and that
finally means to be conscious of the “absolute Spirit.”
The very concept of ‘spirit’ doesn’t have any meaning
unless is related to “absolute Spirit.” One cannot
understand, in a valid manner, the spirit as a form of
consciousness, even the highest; spirit is not reduced
to a kind of relation. Consciousness is a moment in the
being of spirit, and this is the connection between
spirit, and the absolute Spirit. Finite spirit is at
once different from and identified with absolute Spirit,
this is an understanding which is grasped in religion.
Finite spirit and absolute Spirit aren’t in any way
separated in the process of knowing. Finite spirit is a
manifestation of absolute Spirit knowing itself as the
totality of both knowing and the known.
[36]
This infinite consciousness is in fact God, but one can
ask what kind of consciousness is this? It is a self
consciousness, becoming conscious of itself by a process
of knowing itself, and in this development, finite
spirit doesn’t have any particular consciousness of
objects or of itself because it is only finite
manifestation of infinite self-consciousness.

In order to make a link
between Hegel’s conception of religion, and Nietzsche’s
ideas about religion, and mainly the Christian religion,
I have to analyze what relations can be found between
Hegel’s philosophy of religion, and God, as seen by the
Christian tradition. In this vein, it must be said that
many can be surprised by the fact that Hegel employs a
language which is mostly familiar to Christians. It is
not only the language, but his speculative logic has its
roots there. How can be appropriate, for a narrow
theological frame, a philosophy, which proclaims the
autonomy of human reason? One solution could be that of
not taking Hegel literally. But apart of the possible
accusations of bad taste Hegel could also be accused of
choosing an inappropriate vocabulary for his purpose.
But are these types of accusations right? What than can
be said of the apparent contradiction of an explicit
affirmation of the autonomy of reason doubled with
persistence on a theological content of rational
thinking? Hegel was not inconsistent of theologizing
philosophy because he threw light not only on the
essential finitude of reason, especially when the
emphasis is on the subjective response called religion,
but also on the infinite object to which religion is the
response. Hegel has no difficulty in recognizing the
value of the partial truth because he can view the
finite and partial against the infinite and whole.[37]

I am also making few
observations about Hegel’s Christology, which I will
compare with Nietzsche’s ideas about Christ, in order to
be able to see better their different approach. For
Hegel, God, Who is Spirit, can reveal himself only to
man who is spirit. In fact the possibility for man to be
spirit is divine revelation. The paradigm of this divine
revelation, according to Hegel, can be found in the
God-man, Who was Jesus Christ. Hegel didn’t deny that
Jesus was human but he considered that the truth of
Jesus Christ is not exhausted in his humanity. Besides
knowing ‘who’ Christ was, we should know ‘what’ Christ
is, and in Hegel’s perspective Christ is the paradigm of
God’s self-revelation in human-nature. Christ as an
object of devotion is not enough revelation, if knowing
Him doesn’t bring us any closer to knowing God. In the
“Berliner Schriften” one can see that Hegel criticised
the Protestant theology because: “Thus the appearance of
Christ has been degraded to a mere object of remembrance
and of moral foundations.”[38]
The only way to know what God is, as Spirit, is
explicated in a religious comprehension as Trinity of
Persons. The God Spirit is Three, but also One, and that
is the only way, for God, to be, in the same time,
infinite and finite, absolute and personal.

I would agree with
Hegel, because to me, in order to be Personal, God needs
to have certain limits, at least certain precise
determinations, if not, we have to speak of an infinite
‘personality,’ but that seems to be nonsense. Why is
that? I reckon that the way we understand the concept of
personality, presupposes that it has to have certain fix
determinations, to be quantified, someone ought to have
certain limits, a definition, in order to be personal.
But how can we determine, quantify, an infinite reality?
This development is pushing us to an understanding of
God who is Spirit, probably impersonal Spirit, and Who
become personal in man, and paradigmatically in Jesus
Christ. The question is to know if this interpretation
of God is in accordance with the classical Christian
doctrine, about Trinity, and most probably is not. The
Three Persons of Trinity have all personal
characteristics. Another question is to know if the
classical Christian doctrine, about Trinity, can be
sustained with rational arguments, in a convincing way.
The answers to these questions make the difference
between the dogmatic Christian theology, and much more
flexible and rationally motivated dealings, found in
philosophy of religion. If God the Father is a Person,
in the way the Christian traditions present Him, He
didn’t need Jesus in order to become personal, but, in
fact, He needed Jesus, and in Christ we can see the
fulfilment of the human as spirit. A quotation from
“Vorlesungen uber die Aesthetik” is very enlightening
for this approach.

“Now, in order that
spirit attain to its infinity it must likewise emerge
from merely formal and finite personality to the
Absolute, i.e., the spiritual must present itself as the
subject which at once [is] the fulfilment of the purely
substantial and thereby is self-knowing and
self-willing. Conversely, the substantial, the true, may
not, therefore be taken to be simply beyond humanity,
such that the anthropomorphism of the Greek view is
completely eliminated; rather the human as actual
subjectivity must be made into a principle, and the
anthropomorphic, as we have already seen, only this
brought to perfection. [VA II, p. 129] In the Christian
religion man succeed to understand what it is for man to
be spirit, and only with the speculative philosophy man
comprehends what it is for God to be Spirit, the Spirit
who dwells in man and thus lifts him to the divine.[39]
For Hegel, the Incarnation is a “speculative
middle-point,” a ‘Vorstellungen’ representing an event
in history with “disclosure significance,” in relation
to the question of God’s essential nature and his
relation to the world.[40]

The question still
remains. Is Hegel’s God a transcendental Being existing
independently of the human, and Who can exist even in
the case when no man exist, in the universe? The
positive answer is an interpretation proper to the
Christian consecrated traditions, and surely is
representative for the institutional Churches. In
Hegel’s view the common source of the human spirit and
of the nature doesn’t come from outside reality, but it
is inherited in it. God is not an abstract, independent,
Being, a source disconnected from humans or nature, but
he is an evolving reality, going through successive
modes. The absolute, the Christian God is not immovable,
but active; the absolute is not a principle behind the
nature and of mind, but is itself successively nature
and mind. God is then the process, this perpetual
generation of things, is the absolute itself.

In Shelling, things
proceed from the absolute, which, for that very reason,
remains outside of them. In Hegel, the absolute is the
process itself; it does not produce movement and life,
it is movement and life. It does not exceed the things,
but is wholly in them; nor does it, in any way, exceed
the intellectual capacity of man. If we mean by God the
being transcending human reason, then Hegel is the most
atheistic of philosophers, since no one is more emphatic
in affirming the immanency and perfect knowableness of
the absolute. Spinoza himself, the philosopher of
immanency, does not seem to go so far; for, although he
concedes that the intellect has an adequate idea of God,
he assumes that the Substance has infinite attributes.[41]

This quotation, from the
History of Philosophy by Alfred Weber, is very clear and
concise, and I agree that it expresses the way in which
Hegel understood God.

With Nietzsche, and his
word “God is dead,” one can notice a new development in
the philosophy of religion, in which, from the sense, or
meaning, of the natural to spiritual evolution, God, at
least as promoted by the Christian institutions, became
insignificant and misplaced, a danger for the free
evolution of nature, for the deployment of the full
potential of nature, in humans. We must notice that the
expression “God is dead appeared, for the first time in
Hegel. In a Lutheran context, Hegel has something to
say, in his 1831 lectures on religion, concerning the
“death of God. “The highest divestment of the Divine
Idea …is expressed in a Lutheran Hymn as follows: <<God
has died, God himself is dead.>> This is a monstrous,
fearful ‘Vorstellung’ which brings before the
imagination the deepest abyss of cleavage.” (Hegel, LPR,
ed. Hodyson, vol. 3, p. 125)[42]
In the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel also says: The
Unhappy Consciousness is, conversely the tragic fate of
the certainty of self that aims to be the Absolute. It
is the consciousness of … the loss of substance as well
as of the self; it is the grief which expresses itself
in the hard saying that <<God is dead. >> (Hegel, Pf.G.
para 752)[43]

Hegel projects an
optimistic interpretation of the death of God. Through
His death God realizes Himself in his infinity through
His identity with and as humanity. Death is raised to a
higher level, into the infinity of the divine life, by
the act of God, taking death upon Himself. Death is
negated, and also overcome, in the same time. In
“Lecture 65,” Hegel said: “God … maintains himself in
this process [of death], and the latter is only the
death of death. God rises again to life, and thus things
are reversed.” The death of God, for Hegel, is “the
death of the abstraction of the divine being which is
not posited as Self.” Going through death, God
resurrects in worldly form, as self-conscious humanity.
From a mere abstraction God resurrects as Spirit. Divine
death is understood by Hegel as a unique event, in which
God’s self-realization in the world is seen. Crucifixion
represents the death of God, as an abstract,
metaphysical being by his complete dip in history and
human life. God truly lives only in the temporal world,
and whoever live must also die. But Hegel’s optimism is
justified by the resurrection of God, meaning that He is
resurrected in the Spirit, and lives through the
religious consciousness of the members of His church.
The life of the Spirit in the world, manifested through
believers, radiates and converts the people. Jesus was
the role model, the epitome of the manifestation of
spirit in the human consciousness, but He was not the
only One in Whom spirit manifests. As a consequence of
the process, described by Hegel, Thomas Altizer speaks
of the unlimited sacralizing of the profane, secular
world, and Thomas Carlson sustains that the resurrected
life envisioned by Hegel entails an overcoming of
finitude. The death of God represents an emancipation of
this world from the limitations imposed by the image of
another world, which tends to extract life and value,
and above all meaning, from the human existence on
earth. There is no need for another reality in order to
explain the infinite meaning of this world.[44]

The main criticism
directed by Nietzsche against Hegel can be found in the
area of nihilism, and surely this affected greatly the
evolution of the philosophy of religion in its course
towards post-modernity. Probably the Hegelian concept of
spirit was already suspecting, in Nietzsche’s eyes,
because this concept it doesn’t seem to be a natural
product, rather an artificial one. Nevertheless,
Nietzsche had his own understanding about what ‘spirit’
can be. He posited that there are two forces at work,
the Apollonian and the Dionysian, both with reference to
the Greek gods; the former referring to the Greek god of
order and stability, the latter the god of wine and
ecstasy. Every individual is propelled by these two
forces, the Apollonian pushing the individual to find a
‘self’ or being, and the Dionysian moving the individual
to find newness and to experiment with unknown aspects
of oneself. The Will to Power is in its essence the Will
to Being, a continuous preoccupation with finding one’s
place in the universe. To give ones a physical form, and
stability, to crystallize a certain power, Apollinianism
is needed. A creative spirit, in a world of ceaselessly
unending change, without this Apollinian ability, would
be like a Michelangelo without hands. The creative force
is the Dionysian, driven by its power one seeks new
horizons. Depending on how strong this force is in a
person, the less or more restless he or she will be.
Dionysian is not only the force of creation, is also the
force of destruction. Mental Apollianism is
consciousness, mental Diosynianism is unconsciousness.
Only when a man's Dionysian and Apollinian elements are
balanced in such a way as to give maximum 'free will' to
both at once, perfection exists. The grater is the
possibility of the one, the grater possibility of the
other.[45]
As one can see, the Hegelian spirit is very different
from the Nietzsche’s one. For the latter, who was not
happy at all with Christianity or any other religion,
the ‘spirit,’ as understood by Hegel, was a useless
philosophical construct. Nietzsche also was not happy
with the Christian values, as expressed and presented by
the Christian institutions, but the freedom of the
spirit, as it was conceived in the Hegelian philosophy,
was not the same with the traditional Christian
understanding of God.

In order to grasp better
the criticism of Hegel by Nietzsche we have, firstly, to
acknowledge the fact that Hegel was a major contributor
to the development of Nietzsche’s philosophical means.
In spite of this, Hegelian dialectic was an object for
the Nietzsche’s critical attention paid to the
metaphysical tradition. What is Nihilism? In short, the
Nihilism could be described as the impossibility of
accepting the burdens of the real world, the refusal of
the concrete order of things, such as it is displayed,
in the realm of the worldly sensitive experience. Both
Nietzsche and Hegel belong to the lengthy, far-reaching
modern school of post-Cartesian which refused to
identify human rationality with the mathematical
accuracy and basic intellectual capacity of calculation.
The confusion between reason (Vernuft) and understanding
(Verstand) brought to the mechanical understanding and
consequently to the prominence of the concept of
causality. Only Verstand is in fact able to express the
endless tonalities of the Being. In the same time,
Nietzsche and Hegel are divided by the question about
the ontological status of the individuality. In a draft
from 1873, his second “Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen,”
Nietzsche explained what the main disagreements were
that drove him apart from Hegel in the field of the
philosophy of history, more precisely in the chapter
concerning the role of singular persons in the
historical process. Nietzsche’s views on the role of the
individual in history assert that humans depart from
their own limitations and ontological faults in order to
get their dignity through the risk of self-government
and decision, even against a background of uncertainty.
Against the principles that constitute the core of the
Hegelian philosophy of history, Nietzsche maintains that
the historical responsibility of individuals is not a
burden; it is not a reflex of ignorance or an image of
the individual secondary role in the historical drama.
The principal of personal responsibility is the mark of
a true ethic life and the tendencies of modern forms of
Nihilism which try to avoid the high price and ordeal of
responsibility and decision. The exercise of
responsibility is the solid ground for the human value
and this acknowledgement leads towards the search of a
new morality “beyond good and evil.”[46]

I present these
observations because I think that the Nietzsche’s
approach on Christianity is linked with his conception
about the individual responsibility which is undermined
in a value system in which a transcendental reality,
takes charge of the human conduit. In order to see the
connection between Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger,
around the issues pertaining to the philosophy of
religion, I started to say few words about transcendence
and the way in which it is seen by each of these
philosophers. According to Nietzsche “Man is something
that should be overcome.” It is not to be overcome, as
is the case in the Christian teachings, by
spiritualization, coming from above, from a Supreme
Being, or from spiritualization, coming from an
evolution of the Spirit, and made manifest in the human
spirit, but through self-transcendence, by his or her
own means. The overman is Nietzsche’s model of the
self-perfected man, the one who has overcome or
transcended himself or her. Self-overcoming as the basis
of self-transcendence and self-perfection is the core of
the Nietzsche’s philosophy of man.

There isn’t any Creator
of the universe for Nietzsche and the idea of a
universal Creator who is responsible for His creation
would undermine the principle of human responsibility,
so dear to him. I must admit that this principle of
human responsibility seem very reasonable to me but in
fact the human responsibility is the core of what God
expects from humans. Nietzsche sees the humans as being
his or her own master but, in the same time, we are
parts of a whole. God can be seen as a personification
of a regulatory principle in which all individuals and
their “will-to-power” are harmonized in a universal
peaceful concert. Hegel was right to take into
consideration the oneness of reality and his harmony, in
the “Absolute knowledge,” and Nietzsche’s continuous
competing world can survive but with lots a collateral
damage.

As the ‘creator’ and the
‘creature’ of his authentic existence, man is what he or
she does from himself or her. For Nietzsche the human
capacity of self-command is of the essence of the
humanity. To be able of overcoming is of the essence of
what means to be human. How can one be, in the same
time, the one who overcomes and the one who is overcome?
What constitutes the human reality of self-overcoming,
and what is to be overcome? Is there an underlining
substance with double polarity, or two different
potentials, among which one have to choose? Are they two
forces, which exclude each other or just one with two
opposing poles? The human is an artist, but not only,
also is, in the same time, the basic raw material, and
the finished product of his own self-transcending
creativity. The creative artist must overcome the
resistance of the raw material in transforming it into a
beautiful work of art, also the creator, in the human,
must overcome the resistance of his natural self and
that through the artist’s creative appropriative power
of projection and interpretation. Inside humans there is
‘chaos’ which refers to the natural self and is the
chaos of unrestrained instincts, drives, desires and
passions. At the bottom, the human is nothing more than
a field of competing instincts. Each instinct seeks its
own gratification and seeks to control every other
instinct, and Nietzsche termed this dynamic essence or
the instinctual field the "will to power." All
instinctual drives have this will to power.[47]

For Nietzsche
transcendence is possible only as human
self-transcendence and not at all as a superior
transcendence of a God. From the structure of
Nietzsche’s thinking one can see that there is no place
for God in his philosophy. Nietzsche tries to overcome
the negative nihilism figuring out how man may pass from
his present condition to a new comprehension of Being
and as such to a superior condition. Nietzsche makes the
difference between the man as he was until now, the last
man and man as he should be, the “superior,” or “super”-
man. The reason why the “modern man” is lost in a
value-less nihilism is that he has not really entered
into himself. Failing to do that, he cannot understand
and appreciate correctly his own nature and consequently
cannot assume it. The super-man has comprehended himself
and accepted his real nature, in terms of the
Will-unto-Power and consequently he has a new relation
to Being. The super-man brings the essence of man into
the truth and freely assumes that truth.

What is than the
movement in the understanding of the philosophy of
religion, concerning God, in the German idealism, form
Kant to Hegel, and from Hegel to Nietzsche? Starting
with Kant, who criticized the philosophical proofs for
the existence of God, the existence of a transcendental
Being, the source for all that is, became problematic,
from the point of view of the human reason. For Kant,
human reason seeks to move from an apprehension of a
series of conditioned phenomena in space and time to the
affirmation of a ground for such series that is
represented as unconditioned, i.e., as independent of
space and time. He considered such a movement, to claim
knowledge outside the limits of experience, to be
problematic. He also considered that it lies beyond the
powers of human reason to bring us to any knowledge of
an unconditioned ground for the framework within which
we apprehend objects in their spatio-temporal relations.
This tendency to go beyond the limits of experience
culminates in the representation of ideas such as the
idea of the soul, the world, and God as the final
outcome of the efforts of reason to affirm what is
absolutely unconditioned. In the same time, Kant sees a
significant negative side in the concrete, historical
character of the human reception of the religion. In
consequence, Kant articulates some of his strongest
criticisms of the organization and practices of
Christianity that encourage what he sees as a
counterfeit service to God, and among the major targets
of this criticism are external ritual, and a
hierarchical church order.[48]

Nietzsche is not than
the first critic of Christianity in its
institutionalised form, but he follows an established
tradition. Hegel prompted himself to re-establish the
status of reason according it a much more complex scope.
Nietzsche sees behind the Judeo Christian traditions a
development, which starts with Plato. He was a
philosopher who understood very well the philosophical
failure of Christianity and he criticized the roots of
such a situation. The separation between the ideal realm
of God and the reality of the world with the imposition
of the former over the latter was one of the main causes
of the misrepresenting of God. For Plato the world of
Ideas was the real one, the truth, unchangeable,
idealized reality and the instable sensible world was
only a domain of shadows, of appearances. Transposed and
subordinated by Christianity, through the philosophy of
neo-Platonists and Fathers of the Church this Platonist
pattern suited perfectly to the need of rationality,
which summoned the Church. He didn’t really criticize
Christianity as a possibility of a miraculous path
towards the universe but he negated the philosophical
fundament of it, casting doubts about its rational
support. “God is dead” is a philosophical concept and
doesn’t question the possibility of the existence of
God, as a reality, but the metaphysical description of
such a possibility.

For Nietzsche, the worst
error of philosophy have been a metaphysics of
transcendence the idea of a ‘true’ or ‘real’ world,
which transcends the world of the senses, which is the
world as we experience it. Plato left a legacy of error,
which influenced deeply the Western philosophical and
religious views. The idea of another world is found in
Christian thought through its philosophers such as:
Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, and Leibniz. It
also appears in Spinoza, Kant and the post-Kantian
tradition in which Nietzsche includes Hegel and
Schopenhauer. The origin of this false belief in a
transcendental world is a moral belief, because truth,
goodness, or wisdom cannot have their origins in their
opposite, meaning in this ‘lowly, deceptive world’ of
the senses and desire. To explain these virtues the
philosophers needed to refer to, something imperishable,
not things as they appear to us, but Reality itself.
Several questions arise. Do opposites really exist? Is
‘true’ the opposite of falsehood? Is goodness the
opposite of badness? Are values such as goodness
absolute or relative? Is the relativity of values, in
case they are relative, explained by psychological
drives?

Throughout his
philosophy Nietzsche’s concerns with origins, both
psychological and historical, is visible. For him,
philosophical theories and arguments are not a priori
but they have a specific historical basis. Opposite to
Plato, who tried to define general philosophical
concepts, such as justice or knowledge, Nietzsche aimed
in explaining the concepts by their history. The
knowledge doesn’t come, for Nietzsche from through the
contact with abstract Ideas or Forms, and the realm of
such abstractions doesn’t even exist. All otherworldly
is seen by Nietzsche as mere projections of a certain
kind of Will to power. The transcendence promoted by the
philosophers is just a way in which they promote their
need for contemplation. The values of the philosophers
sustain a certain kind of life, one in which they can
achieve a maximum feeling of power. Philosophy requires
a lifestyle not of action but of contemplation, and also
a certain ‘ascetism.’ In order to protect this life of
the mind the philosophers present their values as being
transcendent values of the mind, knowledge of the truth
and goodness, and that they are grater than the values
of the body and of the world of experience and action.
This kind of attitude enables them to maximise their
feeling of power over themselves, expressed in ascetism,
and over others, by getting other people to respect
their way of life. We find this idea in “Beyond Good and
Evil,” as a hint, and developed in “On the Genealogy of
Morals.”[49]

Are the philosophers
responsible for the emergence of Christianity? Of course
they are not. Christianity surfaced in the context of
the Hebraic religion, which was far from the Greek
philosophical environment. Jesus himself preached the
existence of another world, the Kingdom of God, which
was not and which is still not fully present on earth,
but only inside the people who receive Him. Probably the
right question to be asked is what was to happen to
Christianity, if it didn’t encounter, in the course of
history, the Greek philosophy? I argue that the need for
‘reason’ cannot by supply by anything else and ‘faith’
alone without philosophy set Christianity at the level
of any other human believes. My opinion is that without
philosophy Christianity couldn’t be a comprehensive
framework for the biggest questions which confront the
human mind. There is a need for reason in the human
consciousness and the failure to answer to this need
marginalizes any system of religious believes. The
Fathers of the Church probably understood this need and
tried to answer it. Another question also is to
know if Jesus was only the personification of the
contemplative human mind, or more than that. Was Jesus
the biggest contemplative human being, in the history of
humanity, or was He more, such as Hegel presented Him?
To answer to that question one needs to consult
Nietzsche, in “The Anti-Christ,” in order to get an
image of how Christ was understood by him.

“On the contrary: the
history of Christianity – and that from the very death
on the Cross – is the history of progressively cruder
misunderstanding of an original symbolism.” (The
Anti-Christ 37) Nietzsche maintains, in this text, that
Christianity has evolved in a process of adaptation to
the needs of believers and on this route became more and
more afar from the original meanings of its founder.
Nietzsche also appreciated that the requirements that
Christianity was intended to satisfy were morbid, low
and vulgar. The Church is view as a “morbid barbarism”
hostile to all integrity, to all loftiness of soul, to
all benevolent humanity. As a matter of fact even the
word Christianity is considered to be a
misunderstanding, because in reality there has been only
one Christian, and he died on the Cross. “…only
Christian practice, a life such as he who died on the
Cross lived, is Christian.…” The Christianity it is not
represented by a set of believes, or a group of
realities or affirmations held to be true, but by a way
of life. Nevertheless, states of consciousness, believes
of any kind or holding something to be true is
incomparable less valuable than instincts. Nietzsche saw
the whole concept of spiritual causality as being false.
Even ‘faith’ is seen as a cloak, a pretext, a ‘screen,’
behind which the instincts played their game. It is a
trick way to hide on the back of instincts. The only
driving element in the roots of Christianity is the
hatred for actuality.

Nietzsche tried to
analyze “the psychological type of the redeemer,” which
is contained “in the Gospels in spite of the Gospels.”
(The Anti-Christ 29).[50]
The philosopher was not interested so much in what Jesus
did or said, but in his typology as a human being, if
this kind of psychology it is possible or usual at all.
Nietzsche didn’t see Jesus as a ‘hero’ quite the
contrary; as a matter of fact Jesus was seen as an
‘anti-hero.’ A hero is someone able to fight his or her
cause, but not Jesus who promoted the principle of
not-resistance to evil. Jesus was not able for ‘enmity,’
and that seem to be telling. A man laking the instinct,
which every other human possesses, the instinct of
self-defence is very atypical. A man born without
natural instincts is a very hard demonstration to make,
and I would argue that Nietzsche didn’t do this kind of
demonstration.

Nietzsche rejected also
the qualification of genius, applied to Jesus by Ernest
Renan. He saw in Jesus the symptoms of an ill human
psychic, not a super-human psychic, but a form of a
natural psychical illness. The symptom described was “a
morbid susceptibility of the sense of touch,” which
Nietzsche considered that is the proof of the
“instinctive hatred of every reality.” In other words
Jesus was born with some ‘anti-instincts,’ which can
explain His strange teachings.[51]
Personally, I think that this theory is self-defeating,
and if this theory doesn’t stand, everything, which
Nietzsche said about Jesus was also self-defeating. Why
is that? If Jesus was the personification of a certain
psychic illness, he couldn’t be the only person in this
situation, because there isn’t any illness with just one
patient. If there is such an illness, with just one
patient, its symptoms cannot be described by the
medicine or by psychology, consequently, not by
Nietzsche. Medicine is a science, and as any science
needs more than one observation, in order to advance a
theory or a hypothesis. If there were more than one
patient, many like Jesus could promote similar
teachings, with the same force and effects, but that it
isn’t the case. It was, in fact just one Jesus, and his
uniqueness speaks about an extraordinary event.

In the New Testament is
written that there where others, trying the same
endeavour, but they were wiped out from the history. Are
all Christians ill with the same illness, as Jesus was?
How about the Muslims who also recognize Jesus as a
prophet? I think that such an assertion it is not
sustainable, in Nietzsche’s system, because he also
maintained, in “The Anti-Christ,” that there was just
one Christian, and he died on the Cross. If Jesus was
the single representative of a certain mental illness
his illness is impossible to detect, because it is
impossible to be confirmed in other cases. What makes
Jesus unique it is not an abnormality, a deviation from
normal or natural, but His contact with the
super-natural or, as Hegel put it, a paradigmatic
manifestation of the Spirit, in the human consciousness.
If Jesus was just a kind of mad-man He would have the
fate of any mad-man, not to be taken seriously by
serious annalists, but this is not the case with Jesus.
He was taken very seriously because behind His teachings
there is not madness but a profound logic, which
Nietzsche, in my opinion, didn’t see it.

It is true that Jesus
described another reality than that of this world, but
was He transformed, by this fact, in a mad person? I
don’t believe that He was. The cosmic reality obviously
entails other aspects, not only the aspects of this
earthly world, and first of all, an infinite dimension,
and Hegel saw this much more clearly, than Nietzsche,
and this is one reason by which, in my own opinion, he
deserves credit. It is false to say that Jesus didn’t
resist evil, He resisted what he considered to be evil,
namely destruction and human suffering, but He resisted
through peaceful means. Even if this is not, probably,
always the right method, adapted to any situation,
nevertheless a huge personality, such as Mahatma Gandhi
saw Jesus like being most inspiring.

Although Hindu, Gandhi
had a very close connection with Christianity and
admired Jesus very much, often quoting from his
favourite <<Sermon on the Mount>> chapter in Mathew 5-7.
When the missionary E. Stanley Jones met with Gandhi he
asked him, <<Mr. Gandhi, though you quote the words of
Christ often, why is that you appear to so adamantly
reject becoming his follower?>> Gandhi replied, <<Oh, I
don't reject Christ. I love Christ. It's just that so
many of you Christians are so unlike Christ>>.[52]

Ghandi was not
considered mad, rather a big personality of the last
century. This is, of course, an example that
Christianity it is not an ideology and Nietzsche rightly
rejected as such, but it is “the way of the spirit,”
which give us a chance to grasp the unimaginable, the
infinite. It is true that Nietzsche rejected this
spiritual dimension of the humans, and tried to explain
everything by merely natural instincts, which is nothing
but an oversimplification of the complexity of the
universal reality.

In order to pass from
Nietzsche’s thoughts on religion to Heidegger it is
important to start with the essay entitled, “Nietzsche’s
Word ‘God is dead.” Heidegger appreciated that, for
Nietzsche, God is the God of Christianity, but
interpreted in a non-Christian way. God determines, as a
symbol, the ideas and ideals, the earthly world from
above and from outside. According with the Platonic
tradition the real world is that of the ideas,
represented by God, and the changeable world of sensible
entities is only an apparent one. The world of sensible
realities, taken in the broad sense of Kant, is the
“physical world” and consequently the world of ideas or
ideals is one of metaphysics, which is of the
“supra-physics” and for Nietzsche the latter was
represented by God. To say that God is dead equal to
saying that the metaphysical world is dead in the sense
that it doesn’t offer any more the foundation for a new
hope. The metaphysics as such it comes to mean nothing
at all and this nothingness is in fact nihilism.
According to Heidegger, the formula “God is dead” is
nothing more nothing less than the realization of a real
occurrence, a striking expression of a fact.

To come back to the
original text of Heidegger’s essay; “Nietzsche’s Word:
God is dead” several observations must be made.
Heidegger considered that Nietzsche represented a stage
of Western metaphysics that is, as it seems, its final
stage. No essential possibilities have remained for
metaphysics, after Nietzsche. The super-sensory is a
product of the sensory and by denying it, as its
antithesis, the sensory negate its own essence. The
dismissal of the super-sensory effaced also the
distinction between sensory and non-sensory. In each
phase of the history of metaphysics the destiny of Being
tailored its way over the beings “in abrupt epochs of
truth.”[53]
In his essay Heidegger states it from the preparatory
stage:

The following
commentary, in its intention and consequence, keeps to
the area of the one experience out of which Being and
Time is thought. This thinking has been concerned
constantly with one occurrence: that in the history of
western thinking, right from the beginning, beings have
been thought in regard to Being, but the truth of Being
has remained unthought. Indeed, not only has the truth
of Being been denied to thinking as a possible
experience, but Western thinking itself (precisely in
the form of metaphysics) has specifically, though
unknowingly, masked the occurrence of this denial.[54]

I took the liberty to
reproduce this passage because it expresses very well
the starting point of Heidegger thinking both in Being
and Time and in his whole work. In the above named essay
Heidegger take also the opportunity to observe that
Nietzsche sees himself as a thinker under the sign of
nihilism. In any case Heidegger prevents the Nietzsche’s
reader to take the word of Nietzsche: “God is dead” too
hastily but to focus on analyzing it as it was intended.
Heidegger made it clear that in speaking about the dead
of God Nietzsche, referred to the Christian God but in
the same time to the “super-sensory world in general.”[55]
As I said earlier Heidegger point out that for Nietzsche
“God is the name for the realm of ideas and the ideal.”[56]
From Plato and from the Platonic interpretation given by
the latte Greek philosophy and Christian thinking the
sensory world is the physical world and the
super-sensory one the metaphysical world. As Heidegger
shows; “God is dead means: the super-sensory world has
no effective power.”[57]
What that means? Was the super-sensible world not
relevant any more?

As Heidegger noticed “In
‘God is dead’ the name ‘God,’ thought essentially,
stands for the super-sensory world of ideals that
contains the goal that exists beyond the earthly life
for this life; they determine it thus from above and so
in certain respects from without.”[58]
If theology was forced, as Heidegger maintained, to the
role of explaining the beings in their entirety it
surely avoided the question of the Being of beings. The
place of Church dissolved authority was taken by the
authority of conscience and of the reason. The
withdrawal from the world into the super-sensory was
replaced by the historical progress and instead of the
promises of an eternal bliss in the hereafter many
people, not all, have chosen an earthly happiness. God
is not any more the only Creator because humankind
entered itself more and more in a process of creating
its own world. What will happen when the hierarchical
order of beings, adopted from the Hellenistic-Judaic
world will be replaced with something else? What else
can be put in place?

Nihilism was not
determined by unbelief, in the sense of apostasy, it is
not a subjective attitude but is an effect of the
misunderstandings due to metaphysics, concerning the
question of Being and the relationship with beings;
“rather, it is always only a consequence of nihilism:
for it could be that Christianity itself represents a
consequence and a form of nihilism.”[59]
Because the essential ground of nihilism resides in
metaphysics itself there is a danger for effects to be
taken as causes. Heidegger considers that any analyzes
of the social or spiritual life will be fruitless until
the place for the essence of man and the experiencing of
the truth of being will be clarified.

Even if Nietzsche
reclaims the field of metaphysics on the basis of a
Life-force principle, his nihilism remains as such in
spite of its highest status. Heidegger argues that it
fails in its claims because it remains metaphysics. He
sees all metaphysics as nihilism. This kind of nihilism
is based on the fact that the revelation of Being as
truth means nothing as far as the Being of that Being
itself does not have any meaning. In fact, the truth of
beings counts as Being, because the truth of Being is
not understood. This is the reason why metaphysics is
nihilism, which is a forgetfulness of Being.
[60]

The only way to overcome
such nihilism is to pass beyond metaphysics and to
approach the Being-process itself. But Nietzsche cannot
do that because he remains within the borders of
metaphysics. If God of the Christian faith left the
place empty other lesser gods rushed themselves to
occupy it; doctrines of world happiness, socialism or
Wagner’s music, “everywhere that ‘dogmatic Christianity’
has gone bankrupt.” This is an incomplete nihilism and
doesn’t sort out the difficulty, because it is
impossible to escape nihilism without revaluing the
former values.[61]
The incomplete nihilism errs by the fact that is placing
the new values in the place of the old ones, which is
the domain of super-sensory and a complete nihilism will
wipe out entirely this area, of the supra-sensible. It
is a new re-evaluation of values, which calls for
another region. Instead of the world of super-sensory
the re-evaluation of all values should be based on life.
The philosophy of Nietzsche is one of the values and
with him the notion of value became more popular in the
modern philosophy and culture. Heidegger noted that the
theories of value became a substitute for metaphysics.
But for him value, if it is something, ought to have its
essence in Being.

Nietzsche raised the
value-thinking to a principle in the attempt to overcome
nihilism. As already said, values does not allow Being
be Being and for this reason a theory of value, in
Nietzsche’s system, it is by no means a overcoming of
nihilism but a completion of it. The kind of disguising
practiced by Nietzsche, toward Being, is more
sophisticated because Being is seen as being value, than
being valuable, but in fact the obtrusion of the Being
of Being is there. Elevating God to the highest value is
in fact a reduction of God, who is considered real,
because his Being is not thought. In other words, being
considered a value, God comes only secondary to Being,
the latest, as an example, with Nietzsche, is the Will
to Power. For Heidegger this thinking “is absolute
blasphemy when it is mixed into the theology of the
faith.”

What is Heidegger’s own
thinking on God? In a work published in 1963, Heidegger
writes that after four semesters he gave up the study of
theology (toward ordination to the Catholic priesthood)
in order to devote himself to philosophy. He adds that
he had begun to see that the strained relations
(Spannung) between ontology and speculative theology
were caused by metaphysics, already in 1911. In “Being
and Time,” becomes clear what metaphysics means for
Heidegger when, at the end of the Introduction, he
anticipates the need of a rethinking of the history of
ontology. He appreciated that the concept of God must be
taken out from metaphysics and the metaphysics must be
gotten out of theology. In a work published in 1957
Heidegger maintains that one cannot worship a causa sui
(the "God" of Spinoza), nor can one pray to it or fall
down on one's knees before it, or dance and make music
to it. He was critic to the way in which the concept of
God gets into the philosophy as the essence (Wessen) of
metaphysics. This is more than the debate about the old
difference between the God of religion and the gods of
the philosophers. The metaphysical "God" of a Hegel or a
Spinoza must be eliminated and also Nietzsche’s “God” of
the super sensible foundation must loose any relevance.[62]

Also in an article,
entitled “La Chose,” (The Thing) Heidegger live a gap,
an opening of a door, in order to make us able to see
his understanding of what a deployment of all reality,
concentrated in a concrete thing, can be. If there are
any divinities, they are included in this deployment,
but nevertheless, he included in it a certain element, a
donation, which is indispensable when someone wants to
explain how the reality works. A divinity, separated
from the world, existent independently of the ‘things’
it is unacceptable for Heidegger, if we have to consider
the article “La Chose,” (“The Thing”). Heidegger
mentions Master Eckhart who employed to word ‘thing’ in
the same time for God and for soul. Eckhart considered
God “the highest ‘thing’ and the most supreme.”
Heidegger recalls also a passage from Dionysius the
Areopagite, where the latter says metaphorically that
the nature of love is of the sort that is able to
transform human in the ‘things’ which he or she love.

What is the ‘thing’ for
Heidegger? In the above mentioned article Heidegger
speaks firstly about the relativity of what we call
‘distance.’ What it seems to be very distant can in fact
be very near by, and something which is in our proximity
is in fact far away, in the sense that his inner nature
escapes to the knower. For example, through the filmed
image, an object situated far away can become close to
us, by his visual image, and an object which is very
close to us can be, from a certain point of view, very
distant. Small distance doesn’t mean proximity and big
distance doesn’t necessarily mean nearness. The question
pose by Heidegger is: “What is proximity if it is absent
to us even when the big distances are reduced to small
spaces?” What is proximity which escapes us even when
the distance is missing?[63]
What happens when, through the annihilation of the big
distances, everything is in the same time, far away and
also close to us? What is the signification of this
uniformity? Probable the answer can be found in the
understanding of the ‘thing.’ What is this thing which
is attracting our attention? It is visible, and also
hidden in the way in which everything is presented.[64]
In spite of all victories against the distance the
proximity of what it is remains absent.

What is it the proximity
and what is its being? Usually the proximity of a thing
is considered to be what we can directly experience,
through a direct contact with that thing, about it. An
autonomous thing can become an object if we place it in
front of us through an immediate perception or through a
memory which reactivate it, in our mind. Nevertheless,
the thing is not what it is because its representation
in our mind nor because its objectivity. A vase rests a
vase either if we represent it in our mind either if we
don’t do that. But in order to exist every vase must be
produced and incorporate many other elements such as,
for example, the clay. In the same time, Heidegger
affirms that even if the vase is autonomous, starting
with the objectivity of the object there is no way to
lead to the ‘thing-ness’ of the thing. Before to
approach the ‘thing-ness’ as such, the mind must firstly
attain to the thing itself, as an object.[65]
The vase is not a vase because it was produced but it
was produced precisely because it is a vase. Before
being produced the vase was already in the mind of the
producer or even in his face as a prototype. What really
is the vase, it is not obvious from the sensory
experience one can have with it, neither from a
thoughtful experience starting with its aspect. This
difficulty is manifested in Plato’s thinking and in all
the thinkers which succeeded him. They perceived all
things presented as objects of production.

In fact, the vase is
just a form for vide, which it contains, and for this
reason what makes a ‘thing’ from the vase is not the
materials from which it is produced but the vide which
is contained. Heidegger criticized in the article the
situation in which science creates only the illusion of
the opening of the knowledge of the thing-ness of
things, but in fact this being of things it was up to
the date obstructed. What is the reason by which the
being of the things was not thought? This is because we
loose its view in the moment in which an appearance try
to impose itself.[66]
What it does for a thing to be what it is deployed as
being in the donation of its offer.[67]
What a thing is, in its being, cannot be limited to the
appearances of a certain thing because it is much more
than that. In every thing one can find many other
sources such as the earth or the water or the air. For
example, in the being of the vase the earth and the sky
are present. The appearances of just one thing are
deceiving, when they are used as the only coordinate
for the grasping of the being of that thing, because
they rather hide than show the complexity of what that
thing really is.

In the above context one
can place the ideas of Heidegger about divinity. In the
same way in which the vase is used for the pouring of
water or vine, in order to respond to the needs of the
mortals, the vase can be used also for ‘libations’
offered to divinities. In this framework Heidegger seems
to refer to ‘divinities’ more as to the Greek
divinities, than as to the Christian God. Nevertheless,
he considers that the ‘libations’ offered to the
deities, the donation or the gift is the veritable gift,
and in a sense a completion or integration of the things
in a higher reality, in which ‘deities’ are not
excluded. These deities can be seen more like the
ineffable mysteries of existence and probably not at all
as a personal God. In this context must be said that
Heidegger’s personal relation to religion underwent
transformations in the sense that out of the Roman
Catholic monotheistic faith, he developed ultimately
into a poetic polytheistic thinker.[68]

In this donation,
consecrated to deities, one can see the deployment of
the being of beings, in the sense of the offering and
sacrifice. The whole idea of donation is contained by
self donation, by sacrifice. There, where the donation
is fulfilled, in an essential mode, where is properly
analyzed and authentically expressed it is identified as
‘Guss, giessen, in French ‘verser,’ it is than
understood as sacrifice.[69]

The mortal humans are
present in the donation made by libations, and in this
way the divinities get back the donation made by them.
In the shed of the donation the earth, the sky, the
divinities and the mortals are present together. All
four are present in the same manifestation, in the same
thing. Even the donation is such a donation because it
retains all four elements. Heidegger explains the term
retains in the sense of creating appearance. It is also
the road to clarity for what is the being of the four.
Starting from their simplicity this four elements turn
in confidence ones towards the others.[70]
The moment of donation it expresses the being of the
four, what is the most essential for each of them, which
is accomplished in this donation. What is gathered in
the donation, gathers itself in creating the appearance
of the four. This gathering is the being of the thing.
The being of the vase is the gathering which shed the
liquid and which gathers in the fact of the presence.
How a thing deploys its being? Any thing has the conduct
of a thing, which means gathers different elements.
Those elements are gathered in a thing for the duration
of their being ‘present.’[71]

The thing it is not a
thing in the sense of the word ‘res’ used by the Romans,
neither is a thing in the sense of “the ens” understood
in the medieval philosophy, and even less an object as
this term is understood in modernity. The thing is a
thing in its characteristic or trend of gathering. In
the process of identifying the proximity, the being of
the thing imposed firstly. The thing gathers, and in
gathering it brings together the earth, the sky, the
divinities and the mortals. Proximity is bringing
together the four elements, but in this approach the
distance still conserves. The thing is not in proximity
in a way as in a container, but it is in the gathering
of the elements.[72]
In the generic notion of the earth, all elements
pertaining of what is terrestrial is included, and the
same is to be said by the sky. What are then the
divinities for Heidegger? The divinities are those which
make us sign, the messengers of the Divinity. The
Divinity is apparent in the four elements gathered in
things but is not something to be compared with any
thing existing in presence. This is a brief exposition
of Heidegger’s conception about God and, in my opinion
seems like a description of a pantheistic or a
phanentheistic view of the world obviously with
important particular marks.

The question of religion
is indestructible connected to the question of being.
The latter was a continuous preoccupation for the
science of metaphysics, in which being found its
possibilities and also its impossibilities. As professor
Joseph Cohen wrights in his article “Le sacrifice de
L’Etre – Note sur le sacrifice dans la pensee de
Heidegger” [The sacrifice of the being – Notes on
sacrifice in Heidegger thinking]: “The <<science of
being as being>> is not limited to any determination. It
opens to what transcends all determinations and overcome
all generic generalities. The being cannot be reduced to
a horizon which can be understood like on ‘object’ which
is already predetermined. For this reason being is the
non-objective, indeterminate and indeterminable
transcendent. These assertions emphasise a problem for
the metaphysics, namely the answer to the question: <<
How can this transcendental be circumscribed to a
science which through its definition must be
concentrated on a <<determined genre>>?”[73]

In his ‘Metaphysics’
Aristotle established the fourfold definition of being,
namely being as accident, being as true, being after the
categories, and being as potency and actuality.
Nevertheless, being, in the utmost sense is reserved to
being as true. In the question of being Aristotle built
a metaphysics understood like a science able to create a
base, a foundation for the existence. This construction
is named by Heidegger “the constitution onto-theology of
the metaphysics.” At this point, the difference between
the “grasping of being,” and “being as the foundation of
existence” starts and continuously diverge, in the
history of metaphysics. Even if Aristotle spoke clearly
about the ‘polysemie’ of the being, in fact the being
understood as essence and substance (ousia) took a
predominant place and was understood as the essential
principle of existence. This hierarchy marked a
distinction between a “general metaphysics” and “special
metaphysics,” the later divided between psychology,
physique and theology. In the area of the “special
metaphysics” a special place is reserved to theology
because it is foundational for the other sciences being
the only science for which universality is an essential
element. In the same time, theology is preoccupied with
the essence of the Supreme Being. Theology was meant to
explicate the essence of the prime and perfect Being and
his attributes, and in this way to make light on the
existence as such. In theology God is seen as giving
being to beings in virtue of His own essence, and in
this way a synthesis between the Supreme Being and the
existence in its totality is made. Onto-theology, for
Heidegger, refers to the whole tradition in which being
is thought as “reason for being,” ‘cause’ or
‘foundation.’[74]

This movement projected
itself up to Hegel and Nietzsche the thinker who tried
to reverse this direction. This movement, onto-theology,
is the essence of being and with Hegel had to be
explicated by constituting itself “in and for itself.”
This was the True which was to be conceived not only as
substance, but also as Subject. In this way, the Concept
is the absolute understanding of being as uncontested
and incontestable fundament of being. In this way the
theology was a constitutive dimension of the
ontology. It was for Heidegger to think the original
place for true beyond onto- theology, and also beyond
any foundation of beings, as understood, in the history
of metaphysics. For him, the true is not any more a
justification of the foundation, it is not seen as
‘adequatio,’ but an event, ‘Ereignis,’ a place were a
double movement of occultation and un-occultation
happens. (A-letheia) The presence (Anwesen) is already
retracted from the “actual present” and that prevents it
to be exhausted in it.[75]

In “Time and Being”
Heidegger opens la possibility of thinking donation,
donating itself in presence, in other words, the “coming
in presence” of the presence. With this, donation can be
thought in its own non-reduction. It is in question the
origin of being as presence, meaning as time, and
presence as present at the present moment. Asking
‘presence’ of its own origin, from where it comes and
thinking of it through another event, namely the “Es
gibt.” Thinking of the being of beings and the being of
time itself, Heidegger thinks of what ‘gives’ being to
beings and to time. “Es gibt” understood as donation is
on which must be thought being and time, consequently
their provenience. “Es gibt” is the matrix of the
donation of being and time.[76]

In terms of the
Christian tradition, God is the source of being and
time, and in order to understand Heidegger’s religious
conceptions, if there are any, one has to see his
understanding of the origin of being, and of the time in
this event of donation. Is there any place for any God?
If there is not, hardly can one suspect Heidegger of any
religiosity at all, unless he remains open to mystery of
the unknown, to the unconceivable, as any human usually
does. What happens inside “Es gibt” is double and
redoubled. Why is that the presence retract itself from
presence when donating to presence? The course of the
history of metaphysics, which is in fact the history of
the being, is the example of this presenting and this
retracting, in the same time. Being retracts from
presence and retracts from this retraction, from
presents, accentuating, in this way its own occultation.
“Es gibt Sein” constitutes the ‘epochal’ character of
the being, epochal understood not as an historical epoch
or a moment in an historical chronology but as highly
significant or important, the original trait of the
donation of being. The being is opening itself in
consideration of its own historicity but, in the same
time, “keeps every time close to itself.” This
historicity is called by Heidegger ‘destiny.’ Quoting
Heidegger:

The donation which
donates only its donation, but in donating in this way,
being able to retain and extract itself from this
donation we call ‘destine.’ If the donation is thought
in this way than being which it is, is the destined.
Destined in its manner are all its changes. The
historicity in the history of being is determined
starting with the destined character of a destination,
and not starting from a <<course of history>> understood
in an undetermined sense.[77]

The donation offers
itself without noticing what is the ‘what’ of that which
is donating and liberates on its on freedom of
retraction. In this way the ‘destined,’ in its destiny
of the deployment of the presence keeps safe the source
unnamed of its own donation. The destined deploys
itself, in the same time, like a ‘reserve’ and also like
a ‘pouring.’ May be that the better word to be employed
is ‘shedding,’ with the sense of something that sheds,
ex. watershed. Heidegger uses this word also in his
article “La Chose,” to which I will come back. The
‘destined’ is the instant when being “liberates in being
the deployment of being.” The ‘destined’ must be thought
in connection with the history of its deployment and the
retraction of this history. What remains to be noticed
is what is conserved namely the traces, the
presentations, the apparitions obtained in and by this
determined unity of all destinations.[78]

I think that I must
present in brief the Heidegerian system in order to show
that there are probably some connections between God,
understood by religion and being described by Heidegger.
God, in the Christian tradition, is beyond time, but
also in time, which means that God is actual in the
past, present and future, in the same time.

God’s relation to time,
however, is a topic about which there continues to be
deep disagreement. From Augustine through Aquinas the
major thinkers argued that God was not in time at all.
They thought of God as eternal, in the sense that he is
timeless or atemporal. Now, the dominant view among
philosophers is that God is temporal. His eternal nature
is thought of as being everlasting rather than timeless.
He never came into existence and he will never go out of
existence but he exists within time.[79]

The majority position
today, at least among philosophers, is that God is
everlasting but temporal. That is, God never began to
exist, and he will never go out of existence. God does,
however, experience temporal succession. That is, God
experiences some events (for example, the first century)
before he experiences other events (for example, the
twenty-first century.) If God is temporal, his existence
and his thoughts and actions have temporal location. He
exists at the present moment (and he has existed at each
past moment and he will exist at each future moment.) In
August, he was thinking about the heat wave in the
mid-west. In the thirteenth century, he listened to and
answered Aquinas’ prayers for understanding. His
dealings, like those of the rest of us, occur at
particular times.[80]

The claim that God is
timeless is a denial of the claim that God is temporal.
First, God exists, but does not exist at any temporal
location. Rather than holding that God is everlastingly
eternal, and, therefore, he exists at each time, this
position is that God exists but he does not exist at any
time at all. God is beyond time altogether. It could be
said that although God does not exist at any time God
exists at eternity. That is, eternity can be seen as a
non-temporal location as any point within time is a
temporal location. Second, it is thought that God does
not experience temporal succession. God’s relation to
each event in a temporal sequence is the same as his
relation to any other event. God does not experience the
first century before he experiences the twenty-first.
Both of these centuries are experienced by God in one
“timeless now.[81]

Some philosophers think
that God’s relation to time cannot be captured by either
of the categories of temporality or timelessness.
Rather, God is in some third kind of relation to time.
One in-between position is that God is not within our
time, but he is within his own time. In this view, God’s
inner life is sequential and, therefore, temporal, but
his relation to our temporal sequence is “all at once.”
In a sense, God has his own time line. He is not located
at any point in our time line. On this view, God’s time
does not map onto our time at all. His time is
completely distinct from ours.[82]

I present all these
quotations in order to show that the problem of the
relation Between God and Time is one of the most
complicated in Metaphysics and also I want to sustain my
thesis that Heidegger, in his philosophical system, in
“Being and Time” and in “Time and Being” touched the
most precarious and un-clarified aspect in Christian
philosophy. Heidegger said that “Time gives time” but
the whole problem in Christian metaphysics is to explain
the relation between God and Time. In the interplay of
the sequences of time “Time gives Time,” and in this way
time is perceived in its ‘being.’ Nevertheless the
‘existence’ of time and the ‘being’ of time seem to me
to be two different issues. I don’t have enough place in
this dissertation to develop this problem but I would
like to say that the understanding of the relation
between God and Time is the key to the understanding of
the relation between God and ‘being’ in finally to the
realization of what the ‘being’ of God could be. From
where comes the existence of time and space, and what
are their relationships with matter is a question
studied by philosophy but also by theology and modern
sciences, and it cannot be reduced only to the
understanding coming from Heidegger’s philosophy.
Nevertheless, in the following paragraphs I will present
the Heidegger ideas concerning the origin of Being and
Time.

The most authentic
question is: “Which is the source of this deployment, of
the being?” At the first approach being (ousia), because
is presence [in time] seems to be marked by a temporal
characteristic, which is, by the time. Another question
becomes necessary: “What is the source of time?”
Criticizing the classic philosophical views on time
Heidegger rethinks the temporality starting not any more
with its traditional representation but with its own
“extatic unity.” This is a unity in which deploys the
differentiating movement of the three temporal
dimensions, present, past, and future. Present, past and
future find them in a continuous play of tension where a
“mutual accord” emerges. The presence is the result of
the donation of the time itself. Heidegger said: “The
time gives time.” Heidegger speaks of the “free space of
time” in order to describe the time in its process of
its own donation. In other words, he proposes to think
temporality starting with that which is not at all
temporal, namely a “space of time”. (Zeit-Raum) This
‘space’ doesn’t need to be represented in spatial terms;
it doesn’t have a spatial extension. It is rather the
‘place’ where the time finds its appropriate unity, or
its own temporisation.

Heidegger emphasis that
thinking “Es gibt Sein” means to inscribe the donation
of being in its history as directed by a retraction and
an occultation. In order to think “Es gibt Zeit” it
means to open the time to the spatiality from which the
‘accord’ of the three dimensions of time deploys and
this accord is given as “approaching proximity,” where
that which is donated rest reserved and safeguarded in
another and afar donation. The “it is” of the being rest
on the “it is” of time, and with this “it is” of the
time rest on another place. There is equivocalness
inside “it is” which come from the thinking, in the same
time, of the donation of the difference of the being and
of the time, and also of the donation of their
co-appurtenance. This donation of the difference and
co-appurtenance bear the name ‘Eraignis.’ What is
“Eraignis?” To answer to this question another language
is needed. Nevertheless, “Eraignis” doesn’t belong to
being, it gives being, and doesn’t belong to time, it
gives time. “Eraignis” give the ‘and’ of the being ‘and’
time, their co-appurtenance. In the same time, Heidegger
tells us that it is impossible to think “Eraignis” as
something present, in other words, it is impossible to
‘represent’ it, because “Eraignis” it is not something
present, it is the donation of the present. In the heart
of “Eraignis” it is deployed the impossibility to pin
point the thinking which endeavours to think it,
consequently, the impossibility to grasp “Eraignis.”
Being and time are not based on a primordial foundation;
they come rather from something which is always free and
retired from any grasp. No ‘foundation’ is there to seal
the freedom of this donation.

In my opinion, Heidegger
raised the understanding of the source of being and time
beyond any classical metaphysical comprehension, without
being in any way irrational. I reckon that he introduced
a revolution in philosophy, similar to the one coming
through the quantum physics, in science. The same
principle of indeterminacy, which is more and more
considered as being the source of all existence, by
physicians, is somehow manifest in Heidegger’s
philosophy. This principle of indeterminacy can be
observed, with special instruments, in laboratories, but
it is harder to be observed with the mind, in
philosophy. Nevertheless, I find Heidegger’s philosophy
very modern and very responsive to the concerns of the
modern man, who expects from science, understood as a
re-questioning of all foundations, the answer to the
question “Why is something rather than nothing.” In the
same time, there is a limit to this way of thinking
present in the modern sciences and in philosophy, namely
that in this way, setting nothingness, retraction,
impenetrability in the place of a Permanent Source it
is, in a way, similar to explaining existence, from
non-existence. In the same time, Heidegger will not
accept that ‘something’ can come from ‘nothing’ or be
created from nothing because that will contradict the
basic principles of philosophy.

The same way of
thinking, is happening in the writings of Dionysius The
Areopagite, where God is seen as something beyond
existence, which is probably nothing else than
nothingness. In my opinion this is a very Plotinian way
of thinking. To me, Hegelianism is a step forward in
comparison with the Plotinus’ way of thinking because it
takes existence as a datum, and doesn’t try to explain
its source. There is not source for being and time, they
just are. They are in interplay and Heidegger’s
philosophy explains very well what is the source of the
presence, but what is the source of the source of being
and time is more like a question of the revelation and
is less of a pure rational endeavour. Before Plato,
Parmenides said that the being is, and it is impossible
not to be, saying in this way, that any discussion about
the source of existence remains a theoretical enterprise
and not more than that. Heidegger very aptly
demonstrated the absurdity of the possibility of a
finite being, as a source of beings, but he left the
question of the possibility of an infinite being, raised
by Hegel, unanswered. “Eraignis” never presents itself
and the donation is, in the same time, retraction.
“Eraignis” is retracted in itself, is never seized in
presence and preserves and safeguards in inmost depths
what it is its own most. “Eraignis” donates in
“Eraignis,” expropriation happens in appropriation, and
in this, the donation of “Eraignis” in “Eraignis”
expropriate itself in that which is donated. To me, the
difficulty in the understanding of God, through
metaphysics is that ‘being’ is prioritized over
‘existence’ and that ‘being’ is a narrower concept than
‘existence.’ Why is that? Because ‘being’ is ‘for,’ “in
relation with” and have to have a meaning but
‘existence’ is beyond any ‘meaning’ or is in spite of
any knowable ‘meaning.’ The necessity for a meaning,
what means “to be” or ‘is’ generates problems, because
everything is relative to the beings able to give a
‘meaning.’ Existence is infinite but any being is
‘finite’ except Hegel’s “infinite being.” But when one
thinks of an “infinite being,” necessarily, God is
presupposed. Can metaphysics ‘prove’ that ‘existence’ is
infinite? This is another debate closer to the
philosophy of religion.

To me, Heidegger wasn’t
in the situation to give an answer to the problem of God
because he was in a dilemma namely that ‘being’ must to
‘present’ to ‘beings’ which get a sense of what ‘being’
is. God nevertheless, doesn’t need to be recognized in
order to be. One can conceive God, who is not ‘present’
to the human consciousness, who doesn’t present Himself
to any intelligent beings in order to be assessed,
perceived, thought or evaluated. God ‘was’ before humans
and He doesn’t need any ‘beings,’ in order to ask in the
direction of the meaning of ‘being,’ and finally to find
the meaning of that ‘being’ in an interplay between the
past, present and future sequences of time. To approach
an ultimate reality from the point of view of human
existence is problematic and this difficulty started
with Hegel, for whom the Spirit becomes conscious of
itself in the human religious consciousness. What I am
saying is that even if no man would be on earth, or on
other planets, or places in universe, or even if there
aren’t other intelligent beings, the universe will
probably still exist, but none would know it and the
problem of ‘being’ wouldn’t be posed. ‘Existence’ than
is before ‘being.’ Heidegger related “the meaning of
being” to humans but one can legitimately ask: “What is
that ‘existence’ of which any possible ‘meaning’ is
totally independent of human understanding? To relate,
or even condition, ‘being’ to human understanding and to
connect the problem of God with the philosophical
understanding of what ‘being’ could mean is a limit of
both, Judeo-Christian traditions, and to Heidegger. To
me, God, and God’s own being, is on one side, totally
independent of humans or other intelligent beings and
resides in Himself, but, on the other side, He also have
a special meaning for the knower, either a human being
or another intelligent being and that special meaning is
specific to the beings that know. In the same time, God
doesn’t need to be known, or understood, in order to
exist.

What is the meaning of
God for humans is a theological question. In order to
answer it, one must start by separating clearly and
decisively the ‘being’ of God in itself and the
‘meaning’ of God for humans. Heidegger answers, from a
purely human perspective, of Da-sein, to the meaning of
‘being,’ but he doesn’t presume any ‘meaning’ ‘beyond’
and totally independent of humanity. Nevertheless, for
Heidegger the meaning of being doesn’t answer to the
problem of God and how God relates to His own being
wasn’t Heidegger’s preoccupation. If there is God, what
possibly is His being? If God is above the time, as He
is presumed to be, this one cannot be responsible, in
any way, for the being of God. For someone who sees
‘being’ in relation with time, as Heidegger does,
God cannot have any kind of being consequently cannot be
said that He ‘is.’ Even ‘existence’ is conceived by
Heidegger to be only the attribute of humans because
only we can ‘be’ in the ‘opening’ of ‘being.’ But this
‘being’ cannot be God because it is dependent of man’s
perception of time. A God whose existence is ‘dependent’
on human understanding is unthinkable, in a metaphysical
manner. In his book “Heidegger’s Philosophy of
Religion-From God to the Gods” Ben Veder argues that an
understanding of religion from a subjective point of
view may seem modern but is just an intensification of
the onto-theological approach.[83]

Only if God can somehow
be thought existing before and totally independent of
humans can He be said to have His own specific being.
But if God gets a sense only in and through the human
consciousness Heidegger was right in separating being
from God. What could the being of God be, separated from
the human consciousness is a big mystery and Hegel
discouraged this way of thinking. For Him the problem of
God has a sense only in connection with the human mind.
Heidegger went farther and demonstrates that starting
with the human mind, the problem of the being of God is
totally inaccessible. It is an answer to Hegel on the
lines of Kierkegaard thinking.

Heidegger’s “Letter on
Humanism” locates religion in the neighbourhood of the
thinking of being, and in the end it is a theological
one. His thinking of being tends toward a poetic
theology in which he names gods, as an invocation of
them. The thinking of being it is not any more in line
with faith, religion or divinity. The above are not in
unity or necessary harmony. Thinking being means rather
to think a topology, a place for the happening of being,
characterized as available. In this context Heidegger
maintains that he does not know God, he can only
describe God’s absence. There is a possibility for the
reception of God or gods, but there aren’t any
confirmations. Heidegger has seen a gap between theology
and philosophy, the first is based upon revelation and
historical occurrence, and this characteristic separates
it from philosophy. He made this remarks before a group
of theological students at Tubingen in 1927. Emphasising
the word ‘logos,’ Heidegger describes himself as a
“Christian theologian, in 1921, in a letter to Karl
Lowith. Asking what is being, in his “Letter on
Humanism,” in 1947, Heidegger answers that it is simply
itself. It is not a foundation or ground and it is not
God. Still, in the 1929 work On the Essence of Ground,
he noted that the interpretation of Dasein as a
Being-in-the-world makes no decision either for, or
against, the possible existence of God; nevertheless,
perhaps by clarifying the meaning of Dasein's
transcendence it may be possible to inquire how the
relation of Dasein to God is ontologically constituted.[84]

For Heidegger, the
question of transcendence doesn’t refer directly to God,
and is related to the relation of being and time. For
Heidegger transcendence is not a question of proving the
existence of an ontic God. It is a question of analyzing
the origin of the understanding of being with respect to
Dasein’s temporal transcendence.[85]
Nevertheless, one may wander, when one understands what
the philosopher means by the word transcendence, if
there is anything like transcendence, in Heidegger at
all, in a traditional sense. For Heidegger transcendence
is: a “standing out” (ekstatisches) of what is “standing
in” (Innestehen) the world. In a seminar, in 1951, in
Zurich, the philosopher reckoned that his understanding
of being can open the way for a new theology. In this
theology ‘being’ will not appear at all, because faith
has no need of the thought of being. Heidegger agrees
with Kant that the word ‘being’ is not a predicate for
God. Inherited from Kierkegaard, the gap between
speculative philosophy and religion is maintained by
Heidegger who would assert that there is nothing
philosophically acceptable in order to maintain that
from nothing comes anything. That assertion is
philosophically unacceptable but is a postulate of
Christian religion which says that “From nothing comes
created being.”[86]

Taking God out from
metaphysics, as a Supreme Being, or, as a matter of
fact, as a being at all, doesn’t take out of the
question the problem of God but prevents a philosophical
discourse of that issue. This is in line with
Kierkegaard but I wander if a conceptualization of a
personal faith in God is really to be avoided as far as
it is based also on personal spiritual experiences. It
is one thing to try to demonstrate the existence of God
on ‘pure’ speculative grounds and it is a totally
different thing to give a conceptual form to a personal
experience. Nevertheless, trying to speak about your own
spiritual experience in terms of a God for whom one
cannot use any attribute of existence, of ‘being,’ of
‘is,’ seems a veritable impossibility, and this is a
difficulty about which, later in his writings,
Heidegger, perhaps, became aware. In “Die Technik und
die Kehre” (The Technique and the Kehre) Heidegger
writes: “Whether God lives or remains dead, is not
decided by human religiosity, still less by the
theological aspirations of philosophy and science.
Whether God is God happens out of, and within, the
situation of being.”[87]
What attitude one has toward being is not without
consequences concerning how one understands the
possibility for God. I avoid writing “for the
possibility of the existence of God” because like
Kierkegaard, Heidegger draws a sharp distinction between
being and existence. He, in “Was ist Metaphysik,” (What
is Metaphysics) notes that the only being that can be
said to "exist," open, in the truth of being, is Dasein.
The rock, the tree, the horse, the angel, and God are,
but do not exist. In saying that God is, but does not
exist, Heidegger explains that it should not thereby be
imagined that God, like any of the other things that are
— but which do not exist — is somehow unreal, or a mere
idea (Vorstellung) of the human being.[88]In
the “Letter on <<Humanism>>,” Heidegger asks how the
thinking of being makes possible the thinking of the
divine.

Quoting Heidegger: “With
the existential determination of the essence of the
human being, therefore nothing is decided about the
<<existence of God>> or his <<non-being>> no more than
about the possibility or impossibility of gods.”[89]

He thinks about the
possibility and framework within which something like a
god has to be thought. Heidegger said:

Through the ontological
interpretation of Dasein as being-in-the-world no
decision, whether positive or negative, is made
concerning a possible being toward God. It is, however,
the case that through an illumination of transcendence
we first achieve an adequate concept of Dasein, with
respect to which it can now be asked how the
relationship of Dasein to God is ontologically ordered.[90]

Heidegger doesn’t take
the attitude of an atheist or of an agnostic, but he
stresses that, before one decides about god or the gods,
one has to think of being. What is the relationship
between the thinking of being and the thinking of the
divine? “Only from the truth of being can the essence of
the holy be thought. Only from the essence of the holy
is the essence of divinity to be thought. Only in the
light of the essence of divinity can it be thought or
said what the word <<God>> is to signify.” The
‘openness’ of being is not God but is only a space, in
which the divine can appear or withdraw. The truth of
being can be found in what appears and also in what
withdraws. The holy is to be found in that dimension of
truth in which the phenomenon of withdrawal would
appear. The holy appears in the concealment, in the
‘lethe.’[91]
This kind of appearing of the divine is the appearing of
the withdrawal within the truth of being and it happens
from the dimension of the Godhead. Heidegger clearly
says that the Godhead as essencing (Wessendes) receives
its origin from the truth of being. God needs being and
as Heidegger mentions: “the admission by god that it
needs be-ing, an admission that does not relinquish god
or its greatness.” (Martin Heidegger (“Contributions to
Philosophy”)[92]

As I mentioned earlier,
Heidegger makes God dependent of the human beings and
not the other way around. God (as the essence of the
Godhead) gets its origin from the event of the truth of
being. He said that God is waiting for human beings and
for the foundation of the truth of being, and not the
opposite. “How few know that god awaits the grounding of
the truth of be-ing and thus awaits man’s leaping-into
Da-sein. Instead it seems as if man might have to and
would await god.” (Heidegger “Contributions” 293) Before
than of raising the question of God, one must raise the
question of holy.[93]
All this started with Hegel, who made man responsible
for the unveiling of God and it is a logical evolution
of the Hegelian thinking, although in a critical way.
For Hegel, the Spirit passes through all necessary
stages in the way to “absolute knowledge,” and this
route goes through the human religious consciousness but
for Heidegger everything happens inside the human
consciousness and that for the humans living in the
world. Living in time, and in the world, and also in the
opening of being, gives to men the consciousness of his
being. Da-sein is much more than what living in the
concrete worldly conditions can reveal; is not just
another being, among beings, as for example, stones are.
I would simply put that on the complexity and
multidimensionality of the human consciousness, but
Heidegger would not do that, because that is an unwanted
subjectivism.

Da-sein is the only
being who question in the direction of ‘being,’ who asks
about his or her being, namely the origin of his or her
being. But this ‘being,’ to Heidegger, cannot be God,
simply because God cannot be, in the same time, a
particular being and also to give being to beings. As a
matter of fact, God can ‘be’ but nothing proves that He
really is, says Heidegger. He leaves open the
possibility of the existence of God and speculates about
the place where He can be found but doesn’t say anything
about the ‘necessity’ of the existence of God, for the
universe or for humans. Is God ‘necessary’ for the
explanation of the existence of the universe and
consequently for the existence of humans? For Heidegger,
He is not, because first comes humans and after that
comes God. I would argue that in Heidegger’s system God
is nearly impossibility because He takes being from the
same source that man takes being but time is not an
issue for God. God ‘needs’ being means that God has to
get being from another source than Himself, but this is
the end of God, as he is understood in the religious
tradition. God is not the source of being but a
beneficiary of being, a receiver, but to me this is more
of an onto-theology even in comparison with the
classical metaphysics. Why is that? That is because God
doesn’t disappear but, in the same time, ‘being’ is
raised to a higher level, even higher than God.

Is Da-sein the only
being able to question in the direction of being? How
about God? If He doesn’t question in the direction of
being how can He be in the openness of being? Is God not
transformed, in this way, in another being, similar to
Da-sein? For Heidegger ‘being’ and God are not the same
thing, being is rather a common source for both Da-sein
and God. Da-sein and God are both derivations from
‘being’ and both need being. Heidegger wants to separate
faith from philosophy. The philosophical reason cannot
bring the certainty of faith. A metaphysical approach
within theology cannot bring the explication of faith.
God as a conclusion of philosophical thinking cannot be
the object of pray or sacrifice. (Martin Heidegger
“Identity and Difference”)[94]

For Heidegger, is too
early to speak about the divine. Beforehand one must
prepare a non-metaphysical speaking of the God. In order
to do that it is necessary that the thinker learns to
open his or her mind for the word of the poet. The poets
can prepare us for a speaking of a non-metaphysical God
outside onto-theology. As Heidegger maintains, man has
to learn to stay in the nearness of being. “In such
nearness, if at all, a decision made be made as to
whether and how God and the gods withhold their presence
and the night remains, whether and how the day of the
holy dawns, whether and how in the upsurgence of the of
the holy an ephiphany of God and the gods can begin
anew. But the holy, which alone is the essential sphere
of divinity, which in turn alone affords a dimension for
the gods and for God, comes to radiate only when being
itself beforehand and after extensive preparation has
been cleared and is experienced in its truth.” (Martin
Heidegger “Letter on Humanism” 258) Some of this passage
I already quoted but I find it essential for Heidegger
understanding of God and for this reason I quote here
the whole passage.

As I already mentioned
in the commentary of Heidegger’s article “La Chose”
(“The Thing”), he develops the paradigm of the fourfold.
This paradigm doesn’t mean that mortals or human beings
have no relation with the gods. There is a certain
theology when they sing and praise the gods. Noticeable
for this is Heidegger’s commentary about the poet,
particularly Holderlin. The poet must wait for the word
to come and with the word he or she can name the gods.
“Mortals dwell in that they await the divinities. In
hope they hold up to the divinities what is unhoped for.
They wait for intimations of their coming and do not
mistake the signs of their absence. They do not make
their gods for themselves and do not worship idols. In
the very depth of misfortune they wait for the weal that
has been withdrawn.” (Martin Heidegger, “Building
Dwelling Thinking” in Poetry, Language, Thought.) There
are two moments: the waiting of the poet and the naming
of the gods.

For Heidegger the
possible has priority over the actual and this
insistence on the primacy of the possible distinguishes
him from the Western metaphysical tradition, the latter
being primarily concerned with the actual and the
possession of the real. The classical ontology is
inclined to change the possible into the actual without
paying enough attention to the possible. The essential
structure of desire, on the other hand, allows that the
possible remains standing above the actual. Heidegger
claims that the Western ontology is concerned with
dominance of the actual over the possible. In contrast,
Heidegger wants to measure the actual from the scope of
the possible.[95]
The place where the possible appears, for Heidegger, is
the dream and the dream determines the measure in which
the actual appears. The unreal gets priority over the
actual. The non-reality of the dream must be thought in
accordance with the ways of the poet. The dream is the
poem of the holy and it cannot be composed in advance.
When naming the holy, the poet creates a special place
to prepare a location for gods and mortals. The
important difference between Heidegger and all
philosophy of intentionality and will is that the former
rejects a transcendental consciousness and that is
because man is always already addressed. Humans are
always already situated in language and because that
they are always addressed by language. The poet knows
that he or she is called by the gods with the aim to
praise their name and this presupposes that the poet at
first has to be a listener to know how to get the word
like a gift. Theology (Theologia) is than a praising,
without a connection to a dogma or to a church.

As a very short
conclusion I would say that from Hegel to Heidegger the
retraction from objectivity to an innermost, subjective
understanding of meanings, in the problem of religion,
materialized in getting metaphysics out from the sphere
of conceptual tools, which permits the human mind to
approach the problem of God. Hegel’s system can be seen
as an extraordinary display of conceptual thinking and
one of the most important products of the metaphysical
thinking in Christianity. Nevertheless, it was
criticised both from the point of view of a naturalistic
approach of the understanding of human existence and
from the point of view of a strict human subjectivity.
The Christian revelation presented God from His
standpoint and permitted a more objective dealing with
the universe, in which the human consciousness was a
receptor of what came from outside it and in which
humans strived to find a place. Starting with Hegel, one
can see a process of appropriation and identification of
human with the divine, a ‘deification’ of the human in
which humans can find a meaning for religion. God is not
a stranger, a total Other, is in us, is us. It is about
an emancipation of the humans based on the evidence of
their power of creation. God is not the only Creator and
if we have the power of creation this must be because
God is in us. Hegel succeeded to avoid the competition
of God as a Creator and humans as creators, and the
presentation of Christ as a paradigmatic human being is
also the best expression of what God can be for man.

In the same time,
Nietzsche found this appropriation of God by humans a
dangerous thing, because being a foreign element God can
pervert and destroy the human nature. In fact, the whole
Christian moral is based on the idea that the human
nature is corrupt and it needs to be replaced with God’s
nature, by a process of spiritual birth, or
regeneration. In Nietzsche’s view, God is seen like a
poison, which finally will take away the most important
element in man, his instincts. The destroyer of the
instincts, Jesus, was Himself a Person without
instincts, which was an anomaly, spread over many other
people, like an epidemic disease. Nevertheless,
Nietzsche found a place for God as an antithesis of what
man should be, namely the over-man. God remains useful,
even if it is ‘dead’ as a ‘scapegoat,’ for all human and
philosophical failures. Nietzsche took God as a useful
element of comparison, as a polarity, necessary, in
order to construct his system. Without Christianity, as
a term of reference, Nietzsche’s system couldn’t be
edified. This kind of construction, on the ruins of
another, is problematic particularly when the wreckage
was deliberately provoked.

In fact, going on the
same direction Heidegger, annihilated not only God, from
the philosophical discussions, but even his memory.
Nietzsche ‘killed’ God and Heidegger “get rid of” His
memory. We don’t need God at all, in order to understand
our origins, our destiny, our ‘being.’ The problem of
God doesn’t even exist; God is not any more an issue for
humans. If we want to understand who we are and from
where we come, we don’t need God for that reason, we
need to understand better the philosophical problem of
‘being.’ ‘Being’ is something other than existence, is
in man, it is his openness toward what he is not, and
can be found in the way in which man understands his
‘being’ in the world, his destiny, and his being with
the ‘other.’ ‘Being’ is not God but is ‘giveness’ coming
from the place where the reality is authentically what
it is. Even if Heidegger explains very well what the
philosophical concept of ‘being’ really is, and how must
it be understood, the problem of the origins of
‘existence’ is not solved. ‘Being’ can tell what man
‘is,’ but cannot say how the universe, indeed the whole
objective reality, objective in the sense of existing
independent of human consciousness, came in place.

A mentioned have to be
made. Even if Heidegger didn’t find any place for the
Christian God, he kept a “spiritual nostalgia” living a
small, narrow “crack in the wall” for the unknown and
the mysterious. He doesn’t totally reject the
possibility of the existence of mysterious beings, who
come in dreams and who gives us signs. The problem is
that getting rid of metaphysics Heidegger cannot say, in
any meaningful way, what this divinities can be and
where can be there place in the universe. In a strange
way, being extremely rational but extremely critic with
the possibilities of rationality, Heidegger came back to
the pre-Christian mysteries and divinities, which, many
of them, ‘died,’ in the human culture, precisely because
they cannot answer to the exigencies of the modern man,
fault of a systematic, metaphysical way of explanations.

The ‘dream’ also is
symptomatic for the understanding of God, by the
Christian faith, because the dream is the way, in which
the Christian God communicates with humans, for example
when Joseph was announced to live Judea, and in many
other cases, in the Old and the New Testaments. The
dream of the poet is not the same with the dream of the
prophet but this is a suitable analogy. If the
‘divinities’ can speak to the poet in dreams why
couldn’t God speak to His people in dreams? If there is
a divine object for thought, why cannot this object be
expressed in any language, such as arts, music, but also
philosophical or mathematical language? The rationality
of the language depends on the rationality of the object
of thinking, and when God speaks the metaphysics cannot
stop Him to speak. It is one thing to recognize the
limits of the rational discourse, concerning God and
another thing to prevent the rational or metaphysical
discourse to speculate about God. In any case, all
languages about the infinite dimension of reality are
only human approximations, found either closer or
farther from the reality of God but lacking something
from His essence. Why is that? Because if God is a
Person He can reveal to us, but also He can hide from
us, and if he doesn’t want to be found He has enough
means to veil. A Personal God is always a Subject and
never only an Object of our thought. If we accept God as
a Subject we will understand why we need revelation, in
order to know Him. Starting with Kierkegaard we
understand the importance of our subjectivity in dealing
with religious faith, but God’s subjectivity in His
relationships with us was probably not enough
considered.

I hope that through the
content of this dissertation I could show that neither
Nietzsche not Heidegger are able to answer to the
problem of the relationships between finite human beings
and a infinite reality, existing autonomous in relation
with the human mind. The question of the human
aspiration, the human ‘call’ toward infinite reality was
approached by Hegel but was avoided both by Nietzsche,
and Heidegger. Trying to negate metaphysics brings the
human mind in the impossibility to deal rationally and
systematically with the problem of God, but the problem
still remains. Trying to get rid of the problem of God,
from philosophy, doesn’t mean to dispense with the
existence of God, who comes in revelation. If one
eliminates a problem, doesn’t mean that the problem
doesn’t exist or is not important. If one considers the
problem of God unapproachable by philosophy the only
thing which achieves is to disarm in front of that
problem by surrendering the most important ‘weapon’
namely the systematic human reason. As one cannot get
out of the human reason when thinking, and as human
thinking has its rules and its requirements metaphysics
as speculative thinking still remains relevant and
cannot be replaced by poetry, art or any esoteric
experiences in relation with God. A divinity that cannot
be thought systematically cannot be understood, known or
accepted.

[44]William Franke … The
death of God in Hegel and Nietzsche and the
Crisis of Values in Secular Modernity and
Post-secular Postmodernity. Religion and the
Arts …
www.brillnl/castsitemason.vanderbilt.edu/.../The20Deaths20of20God20in20Hegel20and20Nietzsche20and20the20Crisi...